Disaster Monitoring with Wikipedia and Online Social Networking Sites: Structured Data and Linked Data Fragments to the Rescue?

In this paper, we present the first results of our ongoing early-stage research on a realtime disaster detection and monitoring tool. Based on Wikipedia, it is language-agnostic and leverages user-generated multimedia content shared on online social networking sites to help disaster responders prioritize their efforts. We make the tool and its source code publicly available as we make progress on it. Furthermore, we strive to publish detected disasters and accompanying multimedia content following the Linked Data principles to facilitate its wide consumption, redistribution, and evaluation of its usefulness.