#trapped! social media search system requirements for emergency management professionals

Social media provides a new and potentially rich source of information for emergency management services. However, extracting the relevant information from such streams poses a number of difficult challenges. In this short paper, we survey emergency management professionals to ascertain how social media is used when responding to incidents, the search strategies that they undertake, and the challenges that they face when using social media streams. This research indicates that emergency management professionals employ two main strategies when searching social media streams: keyword-centric and account-centric search strategies. Furthermore, current search interfaces are inadequate regarding the requirements of command and control environments in the emergency management domain, where the process of information seeking is collaborative in nature and needs to support multiple information seekers.