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Toward Information Sharing of Natural Disaster:
Proposal of Timeline Action Network
The-Minh Nguyen, Takahiro Kawamura, Yasuyuki Tahara, and Akihiko Ohsuga
Graduate School of Information Systems, The University of Electro-Communications,
1-5-1, Chofugaoka, Chofu-shi, Tokyo, 182-8585, Japan
{
minh,kawamura,tahara,akihiko
}
@ohsuga.is.uec.ac.jp
Abstract.
In emergency situations such as earthquake, typhoon, it is important
to share people's actions in real-time. Therefore, in this paper, we first design a
timeline action network based on Web Ontology Language (OWL) in order to
represent these actions in real-time. We then use our previous work to automati-
cally collect data for the action network from Twitter. Finally, we propose a novel
action-based collaborative filtering, which predicts missing activity data, in order
to complement this timeline action network. Moreover, with a combination of col-
laborative filtering and natural language processing (NLP), our method can deal
with minority actions such as successful actions. Based on evaluation of tweets
which related to the massive Tohoku earthquake, we indicated that our timeline
action network can share useful action patterns in real-time. Not only earthquake
disaster, our research can also be applied to other disasters and business models,
such as typhoon, travel, marketing, etc.
Keywords:
Evacuation-rescue, Twitter, Action network, Action-based Collabo-
rative Filtering.
1
Introduction
The ability of computers to recommend useful action patterns based on users' behaviors
is now an important issue in context-aware computing [1], ubiquitous computing [2],
and can be applied to assist people in disaster areas. When the massive Tohoku earth-
quake and Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred in March 2011, many people felt panic,
and wanted to know “what did other people do to go to a safe place”, “how to come back
home”, etc. Since the train system in Tokyo was stopped after the earthquake, there are
about 3 million people in Tokyo who had difficulties returning home [3]. The Japanese
government said that there is 87% of chance of an approximately 8.0-magnitude earth-
quake occurring in the Tokai region within the next 30 years [4]. In this case, temporary
homeless people who are unable to return home, are expected to reach an amount of 6.5
million [5].
To recommend useful action patterns, it is necessary to have a
collective intelligence
of these action patterns
. During the massive Tohoku earthquake, while landlines and
mobile phones got stuck, Twitter was used to exchange information related to evacu-
ation, traffic, etc. On 11 March, 2011 the number of tweets from Japan dramatically
increased to about 33 million [6], 1.8 times higher than the average figure. Therefore,
