Applications of Social Media in Hydroinformatics: A Survey
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paper_title: Collaborations and Partnerships in NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems

paper_content:

NASA has been collecting Earth observation data from spaceborne instruments since 1960. Today, there are tens of satellites orbiting the Earth and collecting frequent global observations for the benefit of mankind. Collaboration between NASA and organizations in the US and other countries has been extremely important in maintaining the Earth observation capabilities as well as collecting, organizing and managing the data. These collaborations have occurred in the form of: 1. NASA’s developing and launching spacecraft and instruments for operation by other agencies; 2. Instruments from collaborating organizations being flown on NASA satellites; and 3. Instruments from NASA being flown on satellites from collaborating organizations. In addition, there are collaborations such as joint science teams, data exchanges, and participation in international organizations to promote interoperability of various data systems. The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the Earth science data-related collaborative efforts in which NASA participates, and highlight a few results relevant to Earth system science research obtained through such collaborations.
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paper_title: Big Data challenges in building the Global Earth Observation System of Systems

paper_content:

There are many expectations and concerns about Big Data in the sector of Earth Observation. It is necessary to understand whether Big Data is a radical shift or an incremental change for the existing digital infrastructures. This manuscript explores the impact of Big Data dimensionalities (commonly known as 'V' axes: volume, variety, velocity, veracity, visualization) on the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and particularly its common digital infrastructure (i.e. the GEOSS Common Infrastructure). GEOSS is a global and flexible network of content providers allowing decision makers to access an extraordinary range of data and information. GEOSS is a pioneering framework for global and multidisciplinary data sharing in the EO realm. The manuscript introduces and discusses the general GEOSS strategies to address Big Data challenges, focusing on the cloud-based discovery and access solutions. A final section reports the results of the scalability and flexibility performance tests. Display Omitted Big Data challenges for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) solutions to address Big Data challenges.The role played by the GEO Brokering framework (GEO DAB).GEO DAB cloud configuration.Performance Tests.
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paper_title: Scientific big data and Digital Earth

paper_content:

Big data has been a focus of research in science, technology, economics, and social studies. Many countries have already incorporated big data research into their national strategies. This paper elaborates upon the origin, connotation, and development of big data from both a spatial and temporal perspective. It proposes that scientific big data will become a new solution in scientific research as the paradigm changes from being model-driven to data-driven. This paper defines the concept of “scientific big data” and proposes strategies for solving “big data problems”. Theoretical frameworks and data systems for Digital Earth are discussed with a clear conclusion that scientific big data is a prominent feature of Digital Earth. As an example, spatial cognition of the formation mechanism of China’s Heihe-Tengchong Line—a geo-demographic demarcation line dividing China into two parts—is discussed within the context of big data computation and analysis for Digital Earth.
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paper_title: Collaborations and Partnerships in NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems

paper_content:

NASA has been collecting Earth observation data from spaceborne instruments since 1960. Today, there are tens of satellites orbiting the Earth and collecting frequent global observations for the benefit of mankind. Collaboration between NASA and organizations in the US and other countries has been extremely important in maintaining the Earth observation capabilities as well as collecting, organizing and managing the data. These collaborations have occurred in the form of: 1. NASA’s developing and launching spacecraft and instruments for operation by other agencies; 2. Instruments from collaborating organizations being flown on NASA satellites; and 3. Instruments from NASA being flown on satellites from collaborating organizations. In addition, there are collaborations such as joint science teams, data exchanges, and participation in international organizations to promote interoperability of various data systems. The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the Earth science data-related collaborative efforts in which NASA participates, and highlight a few results relevant to Earth system science research obtained through such collaborations.
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paper_title: Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media

paper_content:

The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term ''Social Media'' exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.
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paper_title: Mining Social Media: A Brief Introduction

paper_content:

The pervasive use of social media has generated unprecedented amounts of social data. Social media provides easily an accessible platform for users to share informa- tion. Mining social media has its potential to extract actionable patterns that can be benecial for business, users, and consumers. Social media data are vast, noisy, unstructured, and dynamic in nature, and thus novel challenges arise. This tutorial reviews the basics of data mining and social media, introduces representative research problems of mining social media, illustrates the application of data mining to social media using examples, and describes some projects of mining social media for human- itarian assistance and disaster relief for real-world applications.
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paper_title: Modeling blogger influence in a community

paper_content:

Blogging has become a popular and convenient way to communicate, publish information, share preferences, voice opinions, provide suggestions, report news, and form virtual communities in the Blogosphere. The blogosphere obeys a power law distribution with very few blogs being extremely influential and a huge number of blogs being largely unknown. Regardless of a (multi-author) blog being influential or not, there are influential bloggers. However, the sheer number of such blogs makes it extremely challenging to study each one of them. One way to analyze these blogs is to find influential bloggers and consider them as the community representatives. Influential bloggers can impact fellow bloggers in various ways. In this paper, we study the problem of identifying influential bloggers. We define influential bloggers, investigate their characteristics, discuss the challenges with identification, develop a model to quantify their influence, and pave the way for further research leading to more sophisticated models that enable categorization of various types of influential bloggers. To highlight these issues, we conduct experiments using data from blogs, evaluate multiple facets of the problem, and present a unique and objective evaluation strategy given the subjectivity in defining the influence, in addition to various other analytical capabilities. We conclude with interesting findings and future work.
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paper_title: Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network

paper_content:

Models for the processes by which ideas and influence propagate through a social network have been studied in a number of domains, including the diffusion of medical and technological innovations, the sudden and widespread adoption of various strategies in game-theoretic settings, and the effects of "word of mouth" in the promotion of new products. Recently, motivated by the design of viral marketing strategies, Domingos and Richardson posed a fundamental algorithmic problem for such social network processes: if we can try to convince a subset of individuals to adopt a new product or innovation, and the goal is to trigger a large cascade of further adoptions, which set of individuals should we target?We consider this problem in several of the most widely studied models in social network analysis. The optimization problem of selecting the most influential nodes is NP-hard here, and we provide the first provable approximation guarantees for efficient algorithms. Using an analysis framework based on submodular functions, we show that a natural greedy strategy obtains a solution that is provably within 63% of optimal for several classes of models; our framework suggests a general approach for reasoning about the performance guarantees of algorithms for these types of influence problems in social networks.We also provide computational experiments on large collaboration networks, showing that in addition to their provable guarantees, our approximation algorithms significantly out-perform node-selection heuristics based on the well-studied notions of degree centrality and distance centrality from the field of social networks.
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paper_title: Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

paper_content:

Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...
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paper_title: Social Media Analytics: An Interdisciplinary Approach and Its Implications for Information Systems

paper_content:

In this contribution, we introduce “social media analytics” (SMA) as an emerging interdisciplinary research field that, in our view, will have a significant impact on social media-related future research from across different academic disciplines. Despite a number of challenges, we argue that SMA can provide other disciplines – including IS – with methodological foundations for research that focuses on social media. Furthermore, we believe that SMA can help IS research to develop decision-making or decision-aiding frameworks by tackling the issue of social media-related performance measurement, which has been challenging until now. Moreover, SMA can provide architectural designs and solution frameworks for new social media-based applications and information systems. Finally, we call for an interdisciplinary SMA research agenda as well as a significantly increased level of interdisciplinary research co-operation, which must aim to generate significant advancements in scientific methods for analyzing social media, as well as to answer research questions from across different disciplines. Copyright Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2014
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paper_title: Control mutuality, social media, and organization-public relationships: A study of local animal welfare organizations’ donors

paper_content:

Abstract Using an online survey and qualitative analysis, this study examined the role of control mutuality in social media engagement to provide insight for social media strategy creation for nonprofit organizations. Guided by OPR and relationship management literature, insights and implications contribute to scholarly discussions of control mutuality and relationship management.
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paper_title: How social media can contribute during disaster events? Case study of Chennai floods 2015

paper_content:

During the time of crisis millions of microblogs are generated in the social media. Specifically large amount of tweet messages are posted by the users. These can be opinion oriented, sentimental tweets or ones that contribute important information. The latter kind of tweets plays a vital role in decision making during a crisis situation. These types of tweets are referred as situation awareness tweets. Extraction of situation awareness information from Twitter is a non-trivial task as the vocabulary used usually is not formal and presence of short hand words for ease of writing reduces the readability of tweets. Crowdsourcing of data during such a disaster can aid in the task of decision making. In this paper, we propose a technique of extracting situation awareness information using concepts of semi-supervised machine learning along with creating interactive map to locate the vulnerable areas during a disaster.
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paper_title: Collaborations and Partnerships in NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems

paper_content:

NASA has been collecting Earth observation data from spaceborne instruments since 1960. Today, there are tens of satellites orbiting the Earth and collecting frequent global observations for the benefit of mankind. Collaboration between NASA and organizations in the US and other countries has been extremely important in maintaining the Earth observation capabilities as well as collecting, organizing and managing the data. These collaborations have occurred in the form of: 1. NASA’s developing and launching spacecraft and instruments for operation by other agencies; 2. Instruments from collaborating organizations being flown on NASA satellites; and 3. Instruments from NASA being flown on satellites from collaborating organizations. In addition, there are collaborations such as joint science teams, data exchanges, and participation in international organizations to promote interoperability of various data systems. The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the Earth science data-related collaborative efforts in which NASA participates, and highlight a few results relevant to Earth system science research obtained through such collaborations.
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paper_title: Use of social media in disaster relief during the Kuantan (Malaysia) flood

paper_content:

Natural disasters, particularly hydro-meteorological (climate-related) disasters such as droughts, tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons and floods, have increased in prevalence and severity in recent decades. During these disasters, the most pressing relief needs are food, water, sanitation and shelter. While relief organizations are increasingly utilizing the power of social media for informational tools such as disaster response crisis ::: mapping, social media-derived relief efforts initiated by the general public have also increased in popularity. Compared to relief organizations, which have greater access to resources, relief efforts initiated by the general public are typically less organized and more personal and exploratory in nature. This teaching case provides a detailed examination of grassroots uses of social media aimed at soliciting disaster-related assistance. The case study describes three relief effort initiatives that solicited support for victims of the most recent Malaysian flood.
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paper_title: Assessing the utility of social media as a data source for flood risk management using a real‐time modelling framework

paper_content:

The utility of social media for both collecting and disseminating information during natural disasters is increasingly recognised. The rapid nature of urban flooding from intense rainfall means accurate surveying of peak depths and flood extents is rarely achievable, hindering the validation of urban flood models. This paper presents a real-time modelling framework to identify areas likely to have flooded using data obtained only through social media. Graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerated hydrodynamic modelling is used to simulate flooding in a 48-km2 area of Newcastle upon Tyne, with results automatically compared against flooding identified through social media, allowing inundation to be inferred elsewhere in the city with increased detail and accuracy. Data from Twitter during two 2012 flood events are used to test the framework, with the inundation results indicative of good agreement against crowd-sourced and anecdotal data, even though the sample of successfully geocoded Tweets was relatively small.
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paper_title: A geographic approach for combining social media and authoritative data towards identifying useful information for disaster management

paper_content:

In recent years, social media emerged as a potential resource to improve the management of crisis situations such as disasters triggered by natural hazards. Although there is a growing research body concerned with the analysis of the usage of social media during disasters, most previous work has concentrated on using social media as a stand-alone information source, whereas its combination with other information sources holds a still underexplored potential. This article presents an approach to enhance the identification of relevant messages from social media that relies upon the relations between georeferenced social media messages as Volunteered Geographic Information and geographic features of flood phenomena as derived from authoritative data sensor data, hydrological data and digital elevation models. We apply this approach to examine the micro-blogging text messages of the Twitter platform tweets produced during the River Elbe Flood of June 2013 in Germany. This is performed by means of a statistical analysis aimed at identifying general spatial patterns in the occurrence of flood-related tweets that may be associated with proximity to and severity of flood events. The results show that messages near up to 10 km to severely flooded areas have a much higher probability of being related to floods. In this manner, we conclude that the geographic approach proposed here provides a reliable quantitative indicator of the usefulness of messages from social media by leveraging the existing knowledge about natural hazards such as floods, thus being valuable for disaster management in both crisis response and preventive monitoring.
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paper_title: Geo-social media as a proxy for hydrometeorological data for streamflow estimation and to improve flood monitoring

paper_content:

Floods are one of the most devastating types of worldwide disasters in terms of human, economic, and social losses. If authoritative data is scarce, or unavailable for some periods, other sources of information are required to improve streamflow estimation and early flood warnings. Georeferenced social media messages are increasingly being regarded as an alternative source of information for coping with flood risks. However, existing studies have mostly concentrated on the links between geo-social media activity and flooded areas. Thus, there is still a gap in research with regard to the use of social media as a proxy for rainfall-runoff estimations and flood forecasting. To address this, we propose using a transformation function that creates a proxy variable for rainfall by analysing geo-social media messages and rainfall measurements from authoritative sources, which are later incorporated within a hydrological model for streamflow estimation. We found that the combined use of official rainfall values with the social media proxy variable as input for the Probability Distributed Model (PDM), improved streamflow simulations for flood monitoring. The combination of authoritative sources and transformed geo-social media data during flood events achieved a 71% degree of accuracy and a 29% underestimation rate in a comparison made with real streamflow measurements. This is a significant improvement on the respective values of 39% and 58%, achieved when only authoritative data were used for the modelling. This result is clear evidence of the potential use of derived geo-social media data as a proxy for environmental variables for improving flood early-warning systems.
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paper_title: Social media as an information source for rapid flood inundation mapping

paper_content:

Abstract. During and shortly after a disaster, data about the hazard and its consequences are scarce and not readily available. Information provided by eyewitnesses via social media is a valuable information source, which should be explored in a~more effective way. This research proposes a methodology that leverages social media content to support rapid inundation mapping, including inundation extent and water depth in the case of floods. The novelty of this approach is the utilization of quantitative data that are derived from photos from eyewitnesses extracted from social media posts and their integration with established data. Due to the rapid availability of these posts compared to traditional data sources such as remote sensing data, areas affected by a flood, for example, can be determined quickly. The challenge is to filter the large number of posts to a manageable amount of potentially useful inundation-related information, as well as to interpret and integrate the posts into mapping procedures in a timely manner. To support rapid inundation mapping we propose a methodology and develop "PostDistiller", a tool to filter geolocated posts from social media services which include links to photos. This spatial distributed contextualized in situ information is further explored manually. In an application case study during the June 2013 flood in central Europe we evaluate the utilization of this approach to infer spatial flood patterns and inundation depths in the city of Dresden.
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paper_title: Social recommendation: a review

paper_content:

Recommender systems play an important role in helping online users find relevant information by suggesting information of potential interest to them. Due to the potential value of social relations in recommender systems, social recommendation has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In this paper, we present a review of existing recommender systems and discuss some research directions. We begin by giving formal definitions of social recommendation and discuss the unique property of social recommendation and its implications compared with those of traditional recommender systems. Then, we classify existing social recommender systems into memory-based social recommender systems and model-based social recommender systems, according to the basic models adopted to build the systems, and review representative systems for each category. We also present some key findings from both positive and negative experiences in building social recommender systems, and research directions to improve social recommendation capabilities.
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paper_title: Using Twitter for tasking remote-sensing data collection and damage assessment: 2013 Boulder flood case study

paper_content:

A new methodology is introduced that leverages data harvested from social media for tasking the collection of remote-sensing imagery during disasters or emergencies. The images are then fused with multiple sources of contributed data for the damage assessment of transportation infrastructure. The capability is valuable in situations where environmental hazards such as hurricanes or severe weather affect very large areas. During these types of disasters it is paramount to ‘cue’ the collection of remote-sensing images to assess the impact of fast-moving and potentially life-threatening events. The methodology consists of two steps. First, real-time data from Twitter are monitored to prioritize the collection of remote-sensing images for evolving disasters. Commercial satellites are then tasked to collect high-resolution images of these areas. Second, a damage assessment of transportation infrastructure is carried out by fusing the tasked images with contributed data harvested from social media such as Flickr and Twitter, and any additional available data. To demonstrate its feasibility, the proposed methodology is applied and tested on the 2013 Colorado floods with a special emphasis in Boulder County and the cities of Boulder and Longmont.
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paper_title: Social media security and trustworthiness: Overview and new direction

paper_content:

Abstract The emerging social media with inherent capabilities seems to be gaining edge over comprehensiveness, diversity and wisdom, nevertheless its security and trustworthiness issues have also become increasingly serious, which need to be addressed urgently. The available studies mainly aim at both social media content and user security, including model, protocol, mechanism and algorithm. Unfortunately, there is a lack of investigating on effective and efficient evaluations and measurements for security and trustworthiness of various social media tools, platforms and applications, thus has effect on their further improvement and evolution. To address the challenge, this paper firstly made a survey on the state-of-the-art of social media networks security and trustworthiness particularly for the increasingly growing sophistication and variety of attacks as well as related intelligence applications. And then, we highlighted a new direction on evaluating and measuring those fundamental and underlying platforms, meanwhile proposing a hierarchical architecture for crowd evaluations based on signaling theory and crowd computing, which is essential for social media ecosystem. Finally, we conclude our work with several open issues and cutting-edge challenges.
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paper_title: Randomization tests for distinguishing social influence and homophily effects

paper_content:

Relational autocorrelation is ubiquitous in relational domains. This observed correlation between class labels of linked instances in a network (e.g., two friends are more likely to share political beliefs than two randomly selected people) can be due to the effects of two different social processes. If social influence effects are present, instances are likely to change their attributes to conform to their neighbor values. If homophily effects are present, instances are likely to link to other individuals with similar attribute values. Both these effects will result in autocorrelated attribute values. When analyzing static relational networks it is impossible to determine how much of the observed correlation is due each of these factors. However, the recent surge of interest in social networks has increased the availability of dynamic network data. In this paper, we present a randomization technique for temporal network data where the attributes and links change over time. Given data from two time steps, we measure the gain in correlation and assess whether a significant portion of this gain is due to influence and/or homophily. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on semi-synthetic data and then apply the method to a real-world social networks dataset, showing the impact of both influence and homophily effects.
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paper_title: PSNController: An Unwanted Content Control System in Pervasive Social Networking Based on Trust Management

paper_content:

Pervasive social networking (PSN) supports online and instant social activities and communications in a universal and pervasive manner on the basis of heterogeneous networks. However, at the same time, when mobile users expect useful and valuable contents via PSN, they may also receive unwanted, unexpected, or even malicious contents. These contents may intrude user devices, occupy device memories, and irritate mobile users. Unwanted content control in PSN has become a crucial issue that impacts the success of PSN usage. Nowadays, the literature still lacks a robust and generic unwanted content control system that can be practically applied. In this article, we present the design and implementation of PSNController, an unwanted content control system in PSN based on trust management. We evaluate the system performance under a variety of intrusions and attacks. The result shows the system is effective with regard to accuracy, efficiency, and robustness. It can control unwanted contents in PSN according to trust evaluation. We further study user acceptance on PSNController prototype system based on a small-scale user study. We receive sound user feedback on PSNController with regard to perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, interface design, playfulness, and acceptance attitude.
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paper_title: Review of Social Media Potential on Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration in Tourism Industry

paper_content:

Social media have revolutionized communication in tourism industry. Review of the current literature revealed that previous studies have examined the role of information technology in tourism, but still there is a lack of study to reveal how social media promote knowledge sharing processes. To this end, the authors review extant related articles in knowledge management in tourism. The purpose of this study is understanding of knowledge sharing in social media in tourism sector. Specific concentration is on integration of tacit knowledge sharing during pre-travelling decision making. Finding of this study contribute to researchers, organizations and policy makers in tourism industry.
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paper_title: Research challenges and opportunities in mapping social media and Big Data

paper_content:

Social media and Big Data have transformed our world into interconnected cyberspace and realspace. Cartographers can now trace, monitor, and map the spread of social movements, disease outbreaks, nature hazards, and popular events by digitally collecting social media and Big Data with locational contents, such as global positioning system tags and user location profiles. The dynamic characteristics of social media and Big Data provide a great research opportunity for cartographers to map and analyze human behaviors, communications, and movements. However, there are many challenges and pitfalls in cartographic research associated with spatiotemporal analysis of social media contents and Big Data. This short paper will address important research challenges and major opportunities for cartographers to process and visualize Big Data and social media.
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paper_title: Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions

paper_content:

This paper presents an overview of the field of recommender systems and describes the current generation of recommendation methods that are usually classified into the following three main categories: content-based, collaborative, and hybrid recommendation approaches. This paper also describes various limitations of current recommendation methods and discusses possible extensions that can improve recommendation capabilities and make recommender systems applicable to an even broader range of applications. These extensions include, among others, an improvement of understanding of users and items, incorporation of the contextual information into the recommendation process, support for multicriteria ratings, and a provision of more flexible and less intrusive types of recommendations.
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paper_title: Examining the role of social media in California’s drought risk management in 2014

paper_content:

Social media creates an interactive information communication platform for disaster preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. Recent research has analyzed the participation of social media in natural disasters, such as the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, Queensland floods from 2010 to 2011, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and Colorado flood in 2013, but little research has paid attention to drought risk management. In this study, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis method is used to evaluate the social media sites of governmental agencies that were directly involved in California’s Drought Task Force in the historic drought in 2014. The results show that state governmental agencies have used the popular social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) as communication channels with professional stakeholders and the general public. The major functions of social media in the California drought risk management process included one-way information sharing, two-way information sharing, situational awareness, rumor control, reconnection, and decision making. However, social media was not active in donation solicitation and volunteer management. The two-way communication still stayed in relatively surficial levels with limited comments and inadequate conversations. A gap existed to reconnect public social media domain and personal social networks, even though drought risk was closely related to everyone’s daily life. During the California drought in 2014, Facebook worked actively in two-way information sharing for drought risk information and water conservation strategies; YouTube was a robust platform that attracted large number of views on drought videos; and Twitter played an effective role in reconnection of social networks to expedite drought risk information dissemination. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
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paper_title: Social Media Data Mining: A Social Network Analysis Of Tweets During The 2010-2011 Australian Floods

paper_content:

Using tweets extracted from Twitter during the Australian 2010-2011 floods, social network analysis techniques were used to generate and analyse the online networks that emerged at that time. The aim was to develop an understanding of the online communities for the Queensland, New South Wales and Victorian floods in order to identify active players and their effectiveness in disseminating critical information. A secondary goal was to identify important online resources disseminated by these communities. Important and effective players during the Queensland floods were found to be: local authorities (mainly the Queensland Police Services), political personalities (Queensland Premier, Prime Minister, Opposition Leader, Member of Parliament), social media volunteers, traditional media reporters, and people from not-for-profit, humanitarian, and community associations. A range of important resources were identified during the Queensland flood; however, they appeared to be of a more general information nature rather than vital information and updates on the disaster. Unlike Queensland, there was no evidence of Twitter activity from the part of local authorities and the government in the New South Wales and Victorian floods. Furthermore, the level of Twitter activity during the NSW floods was almost nil. Most of the active players during the NSW and Victorian floods were volunteers who were active during the Queensland floods. Given the positive results obtained by the active involvement of the local authorities and government officials in Queensland, and the increasing adoption of Twitter in other parts of the world for emergency situations, it seems reasonable to push for greater adoption of Twitter from local and federal authorities Australia-wide during periods of mass emergencies.
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paper_title: The use of Social Media in Knowledge Integration for Improving Disaster Emergency Management Task Performance: Review of Flood Disasters

paper_content:

Objectives: The main purpose of this study is to investigate the use of social media in knowledge integration for effective disaster emergency management in context of flood disaster. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The study used literature review methodology which involves a thorough literature search into three databases including Emerald, Science Direct and AISEL. Search keywords used were social media, social networking and disaster management or emergency management. Full text research articles published between 2010 and 2015 were included. Quality assessment criteria were set to determine what to include and exclude for this study. 22 papers were identified as potential units for analysis. Findings: The findings have shown that only a limited study had been undertaken in the use of social media for knowledge integration. Also, there is lack of knowledge towards investigating empirically the intricate and dynamic nature of crisis management operations and to determine how knowledge coordination can assist managers in enhancing emergency management task performance. The review of 22 final selected papers has indicated that there is scope for more significant research within three major areas. Firstly, there is an urgent need for Information System researchers to conduct more research regarding the application of social media in disaster situations. Secondly, only one paper has clearly outlined the use of social media within knowledge integration, despite the success of social media within disaster management. Finally, more research is required in order to better understand the determinants of knowledge integration within the context of emergency/disaster management. Application/Improvements: An innovative aspect of the research was a comprehensive look at the relationship between knowledge integration and social media as a new technology in context of emergency management performance.
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paper_title: Social Media Analytics: An Interdisciplinary Approach and Its Implications for Information Systems

paper_content:

In this contribution, we introduce “social media analytics” (SMA) as an emerging interdisciplinary research field that, in our view, will have a significant impact on social media-related future research from across different academic disciplines. Despite a number of challenges, we argue that SMA can provide other disciplines – including IS – with methodological foundations for research that focuses on social media. Furthermore, we believe that SMA can help IS research to develop decision-making or decision-aiding frameworks by tackling the issue of social media-related performance measurement, which has been challenging until now. Moreover, SMA can provide architectural designs and solution frameworks for new social media-based applications and information systems. Finally, we call for an interdisciplinary SMA research agenda as well as a significantly increased level of interdisciplinary research co-operation, which must aim to generate significant advancements in scientific methods for analyzing social media, as well as to answer research questions from across different disciplines. Copyright Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2014
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paper_title: Development and usability evaluation of the mHealth Tool for Lung Cancer (mHealth TLC): A virtual world health game for lung cancer patients

paper_content:

Abstract Objective To test the feasibility and usability of mHealth TLC, an interactive, immersive 3-dimensional iPad health game that coaches lung cancer patients toward assertive communication strategies during first-person virtual clinics visits. Method We observed players and conducted semi-structured interviews. Research questions focused on scenario believability, the impact of technical issues, transparency of game goals, and potential of mHealth TLC to decrease lung cancer stigma (LCS) and improve patient–clinician communication. Results Eight users confirmed mHealth TLC to be: (1) believable, (2) clinic-appropriate, and (3) helpful in support of informed healthcare consumers. Concerns were expressed about emotionally charged content and plans to use mHealth TLC in clinic settings as opposed to at home. Conclusions Although the dialog and interactions addressed emotionally charged issues, players were able to engage, learn, and benefit from role-play in a virtual world. Health games have the potential to improve patient–clinician communication, and mHealth TLC specifically may decrease LCS, and promote optimal self-management. Practice implications Process reflection revealed the need for health games to be created by experienced game developers in collaboration with health care experts. To prepare for this best practice, research institutions and game developers interested in health games should proactively seek out networking and collaboration opportunities.
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paper_title: "OMG, from here, I can see the flames!": a use case of mining location based social networks to acquire spatio-temporal data on forest fires

paper_content:

The emergence of innovative web applications, often labelled as Web 2.0, has permitted an unprecedented increase of content created by non-specialist users. In particular, Location-based Social Networks (LBSN) are designed as platforms allowing the creation, storage and retrieval of vast amounts of georeferenced and user-generated contents. LBSN can thus be seen by Geographic Information specialists as a timely and cost-effective source of spatio-temporal information for many fields of application, provided that they can set up workflows to retrieve, validate and organise such information. This paper aims to improve the understanding on how LBSN can be used as a reliable source of spatio-temporal information, by analysing the temporal, spatial and social dynamics of Twitter activity during a major forest fire event in the South of France in July 2009.
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paper_title: Mining Social Media: A Brief Introduction

paper_content:

The pervasive use of social media has generated unprecedented amounts of social data. Social media provides easily an accessible platform for users to share informa- tion. Mining social media has its potential to extract actionable patterns that can be benecial for business, users, and consumers. Social media data are vast, noisy, unstructured, and dynamic in nature, and thus novel challenges arise. This tutorial reviews the basics of data mining and social media, introduces representative research problems of mining social media, illustrates the application of data mining to social media using examples, and describes some projects of mining social media for human- itarian assistance and disaster relief for real-world applications.
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paper_title: #Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System

paper_content:

Social media feeds are rapidly emerging as a novel avenue for the contribution and dissemination of information that is often geographic. Their content often includes references to events occurring at, or affecting specific locations. Within this article we analyze the spatial and temporal characteristics of the twitter feed activity responding to a 5.8 magnitude earthquake which occurred on the East Coast of the United States (US) on August 23, 2011. We argue that these feeds represent a hybrid form of a sensor system that allows for the identification and localization of the impact area of the event. By contrasting this with comparable content collected through the dedicated crowdsourcing ‘Did You Feel It?’ (DYFI) website of the U.S. Geological Survey we assess the potential of the use of harvested social media content for event monitoring. The experiments support the notion that people act as sensors to give us comparable results in a timely manner, and can complement other sources of data to enhance our situational awareness and improve our understanding and response to such events.
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paper_title: Leveraging Volunteered Geographic Information to Improve Disaster Resilience: Lessons Learned From AGORA and Future Research Directions

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Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has emerged as an important additional source of information for improving the resilience of cities and communities in the face of natural hazards and extreme weather events. This chapter summarizes the existing research in this area and offers an interdisciplinary perspective of the challenges to be overcome, by presenting AGORA: A Geospatial Open collaboRative Architecture for building resilience against disasters and extreme events. AGORA structures the challenges of using VGI for disaster management into three layers: acquisition, integration and application. The chapter describes the research challenges involved in each of these layers, as well as reporting on the results achieved so far and the lessons learned in the context of flood risk management in Brazil. Furthermore, the chapter concludes by setting out an interdisciplinary research agenda for leveraging VGI to improve disaster resilience.
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paper_title: Probabilistic flood extent estimates from social media flood observations

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Abstract. The increasing number and severity of floods, driven by phenomena such as urbanization, deforestation, subsidence and climate change, create a growing need for accurate and timely flood maps. In this paper we present and evaluate a method to create deterministic and probabilistic flood maps from Twitter messages that mention locations of flooding. A deterministic flood map created for the December 2015 flood in the city of York (UK) showed good performance (F(2) = 0.69; a statistic ranging from 0 to 1, with 1 expressing a perfect fit with validation data). The probabilistic flood maps we created showed that, in the York case study, the uncertainty in flood extent was mainly induced by errors in the precise locations of flood observations as derived from Twitter data. Errors in the terrain elevation data or in the parameters of the applied algorithm contributed less to flood extent uncertainty. Although these maps tended to overestimate the actual probability of flooding, they gave a reasonable representation of flood extent uncertainty in the area. This study illustrates that inherently uncertain data from social media can be used to derive information about flooding.
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paper_title: Provenance Data in Social Media

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Social media shatters the barrier to communicate anytime anywhere for people of all walks of life. The publicly available, virtually free information in social media poses a new challenge to consumers who have to discern whether a piece of information published in social media is reliable. For example, it can be difficult to understand the motivations behind a statement passed from one user to another, without knowing the person who originated the message. Additionally, false information can be propagated through social media, resulting in embarrassment or irreversible damages. Provenance data associated with a social media statement can help dispel rumors, clarify opinions, and confirm facts. However, provenance data about social media statements is not readily available to users today. Currently, providing this data to users requires changing the social media infrastructure or offering subscription services. Taking advantage of social media features, research in this nascent field spearheads the search for a way to provide provenance data to social media users, thus leveraging social media itself by mining it for the provenance data. Searching for provenance data reveals an interesting problem space requiring the development and application of new metrics in order to provide meaningful provenance data to social media users. This lecture reviews the current research on information provenance, explores exciting research opportunities to address pressing needs, and shows how data mining can enable a social media user to make informed judgements about statements published in social media. Table of Contents: Information Provenance in Social Media / Provenance Attributes / Provenance via Network Information / Provenance Data
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paper_title: Social media analytics: a survey of techniques, tools and platforms

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This paper is written for (social science) researchers seeking to analyze the wealth of social media now available. It presents a comprehensive review of software tools for social networking media, wikis, really simple syndication feeds, blogs, newsgroups, chat and news feeds. For completeness, it also includes introductions to social media scraping, storage, data cleaning and sentiment analysis. Although principally a review, the paper also provides a methodology and a critique of social media tools. Analyzing social media, in particular Twitter feeds for sentiment analysis, has become a major research and business activity due to the availability of web-based application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by Twitter, Facebook and News services. This has led to an `explosion' of data services, software tools for scraping and analysis and social media analytics platforms. It is also a research area undergoing rapid change and evolution due to commercial pressures and the potential for using social media data for computational (social science) research. Using a simple taxonomy, this paper provides a review of leading software tools and how to use them to scrape, cleanse and analyze the spectrum of social media. In addition, it discussed the requirement of an experimental computational environment for social media research and presents as an illustration the system architecture of a social media (analytics) platform built by University College London. The principal contribution of this paper is to provide an overview (including code fragments) for scientists seeking to utilize social media scraping and analytics either in their research or business. The data retrieval techniques that are presented in this paper are valid at the time of writing this paper (June 2014), but they are subject to change since social media data scraping APIs are rapidly changing.
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paper_title: A novel approach to leveraging social media for rapid flood mapping: a case study of the 2015 South Carolina floods

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ABSTRACTRapid flood mapping is critical for local authorities and emergency responders to identify areas in need of immediate attention. However, traditional data collection practices such as remote sensing and field surveying often fail to offer timely information during or right after a flooding event. Social media such as Twitter have emerged as a new data source for disaster management and flood mapping. Using the 2015 South Carolina floods as the study case, this paper introduces a novel approach to mapping the flood in near real time by leveraging Twitter data in geospatial processes. Specifically, in this study, we first analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of flood-related tweets using quantitative methods to better understand how Twitter activity is related to flood phenomena. Then, a kernel-based flood mapping model was developed to map the flooding possibility for the study area based on the water height points derived from tweets and stream gauges. The identified patterns of Twitter activity w...
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paper_title: Chatter on the red: what hazards threat reveals about the social life of microblogged information

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This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during the flooding of the Red River Valley in the US and Canada in March and April 2009. Focusing on the use of Twitter, a microblogging service, we identified mechanisms of information production, distribution, and organization. The Red River event resulted in a rapid generation of Twitter communications by numerous sources using a variety of communications forms, including autobiographical and mainstream media reporting, among other types. We examine the social life of microblogged information, identifying generative, synthetic, derivative and innovative properties that sustain the broader system of interaction. The landscape of Twitter is such that the production of new information is supported through derivative activities of directing, relaying, synthesizing, and redistributing, and is additionally complemented by socio-technical innovation. These activities comprise self-organization of information.
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paper_title: Hyper-resolution monitoring of urban flooding with social media and crowdsourcing data

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Abstract Hyper-resolution datasets for urban flooding are rare. This problem prevents detailed flooding risk analysis, urban flooding control, and the validation of hyper-resolution numerical models. We employed social media and crowdsourcing data to address this issue. Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision techniques are applied to the data collected from Twitter and MyCoast (a crowdsourcing app). We found these big data based flood monitoring approaches can complement the existing means of flood data collection. The extracted information is validated against precipitation data and road closure reports to examine the data quality. The two data collection approaches are compared and the two data mining methods are discussed. A series of suggestions is given to improve the data collection strategy.
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paper_title: Disaster loss and social media: Can online information increase flood resilience?

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When confronted with natural disasters, individuals around the world increasingly use online resources to become informed of forecasted conditions and advisable actions. This study tests the effectiveness of online information and social media in enabling households to reduce disaster losses. The 2011 Bangkok flood is utilized as a case study since it was one of the first major disasters to affect a substantial population connected to social media. The role of online information is investigated with a mixed methods approach. Both quantitative (propensity score matching) and qualitative (in-depth interviews) techniques are employed. The study relies on two data sources – survey responses from 469 Bangkok households and in-depth interviews with twenty-three internet users who are a subset of the survey participants. ::: ::: Propensity score matching indicates that social media enabled households to reduce flood losses by an average of 37% (USD 3,708 per household), using a nearest neighbor estimator. This reduction is substantial when considering that household flood losses for the matched sample averaged USD 8,278. Social media offered information not available from other sources, such as localized and nearly real-time updates of flood location and depth. With this knowledge, households could move belongings to higher ground before floodwaters arrived. These findings suggest that utilizing social media users as sensors could better inform populations during disasters. Overall, the study reveals that online information can enable effective disaster preparedness and reduce losses. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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paper_title: To Share or Not to Share: The Effects of Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivations on Knowledge-Sharing in Enterprise Social Media Platforms

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In order to foster knowledge-sharing among employees, an increasing number of companies has recently begun implementing social network-based enterprise social media platforms (ESMPs). Although employees are expected to adopt these platforms quickly and use them as actively as they use public and free social media, patterns of private and corporate usage differ. While some research on the determinants of using public and free social media like Facebook has been conducted, empirical studies on the factors determining active participation in ESMPs is scarce. Based on research derived from a survey of 492 respondents carried out in a large knowledge-intensive firm, this paper addresses this gap. The results of our empirical quantitative study reveal that extrinsic motivation in particular – that is, anticipated gains in reputation and reciprocal benefits – drives employees to share knowledge in ESMPs. Knowledge-sharing self-efficacy also facilitates participation, while the enjoyment in helping others does not. The study contributes to information systems and knowledge management research, as it reveals motivational factors that drive the individual adoption in terms of active use of ESMPs. Managerial implications are derived from these results.
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paper_title: Social Media and the Co-creation of Tourism Experiences

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Originality/value ::: Past research on technology enhanced tourism experiences has adopted a phenomenological approach to explaining experience creation. The chapter expands this literature by advocating the individualized and the socially co-constructed nature of tourism experiences as well as by adopting an intersubjective approach for explaining how the social media enable an iterative process among the tourists’ and their social context that in turn is responsible for the continuous formation of tourism experiences.
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paper_title: Motivations and Antecedents of Consumer Engagement With Brand Pages on Social Networking Sites

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Brand pages on social networking sites (SNSs) have become the key platform where consumers interact with brands. This study explored the types of consumer engagement with brand pages on Facebook as well as the motivations and antecedents that drive such engagement. Given the participatory and communal nature of SNSs, this study focused on the effects of social media dependency and three social relationship factors, including parasocial interaction, perceived source credibility, and community identification on consumer engagement with Facebook brand pages. A web survey was conducted to understand the motivations and antecedents of consumer engagement. The results confirm that, with the exception of perceived credibility, relationship-oriented factors played a significant role in inducing consumer engagement on SNSs.
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paper_title: The Resource-Based View of the Firm in Two Environments: The Hollywood Film Studios From 1936 to 1965

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This article continues to operationally define and test the resource-based view of the firm in a study of the major U.S. film studios from 1936 to 1965. We found that property-based resources in the form of exclusive long-term contracts with stars and theaters helped financial performance in the stable, predictable environment of 1936-50. In contrast, knowledge-based resources in the form of production and coordinative talent and budgets boosted financial performance in the more uncertain (changing and unpredictable) post-television environment of 1951-65.
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paper_title: The effects of network sharing on knowledge-sharing activities and job performance in enterprise social media environments

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This study examines the influence of the tertius iungens orientation on knowledge-sharing activities and individual job performance within enterprise social media environments. The empirical analysis reveals that knowledge self-efficacy, social interaction ties, and the norm of reciprocity positively influence the tertius iungens orientation and knowledge-sharing activities in social media, while enjoyment of helping does not have a significant influence. In addition, the tertius iungens orientation has a significant impact on knowledge-sharing activities in social media, which in turn influences individual job performance. Based on the results of this analysis, this study discusses the research findings and proposes theoretical and practical implications of the study as well as the research's limitations. The influence of tertius iungens orientation within social media context.The impact of individual and social factors on tertius iungens orientation.The relationship between tertius iungens orientation & knowledge-sharing activities.The indirect effect of tertius iungens orientation on individual job performance.Theoretical and practical implications for enterprise knowledge management.
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paper_title: Social media models, technologies, and applications: An academic review and case study

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Purpose – In recent years, social media have attracted considerable attention. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to conduct a critical literature review of social media research with the aim of developing a conceptual framework to explain how social media applications are supported by various social media tools and technologies and underpinned by a set of personal and social behavior theories or models. Design/methodology/approach – This study adopted a two-stage approach. The first stage involves a critical literature review of academic journals in social media research, followed by the proposal of a conceptual framework that highlights the tools and technologies as well as theories and models that serve as the foundation of social media applications. The second stage involves the use of an actual case to demonstrate how the proposed framework facilitates the development of a social media application for a regional division of an international non-government organization. Findings – The literature revi...
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paper_title: Customer knowledge management practices on a social media platform: A case study of MTN Ghana and Vodafone Ghana

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The purpose of the paper is to examine how social media can be employed to assist in customer knowledge management in two multinational telecommunication companies operating in Ghana. The study employed case study and netnography as research design. Data was obtained from Twitter and Facebook fan pages of MTN Ghana and Vodafone Ghana. A social media supported Customer Knowledge Management framework was adapted as a conceptual lens. Data was thematically analysed. The findings show that MTN Ghana and Vodafone Ghana have employed social media to manage customer knowledge. The companies engage their customers on Facebook and Twitter to access their knowledge and provide the customers with knowledge about their products and services.
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paper_title: Following Celebrities’ Tweets About Brands: The Impact of Twitter-Based Electronic Word-of-Mouth on Consumers’ Source Credibility Perception, Buying Intention, and Social Identification With Celebrities

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Two experiments examined the impact of Twitter followers, electronic word-of-mouth (eWoM) valence, and celebrity type (prosocial versus antisocial) on consumer behavior in Twitter-based marketing communication, applying social capital theory, social identity theory, source credibility, and extant literature on eWoM. Experiment 1 demonstrated the main effect of number of followers on source credibility, and the interaction effect between eWoM valence and number of followers on product involvement, buying intention, and intention to pass along eWoM. Experiment 2 revealed the interaction effect of celebrity type and number of followers on social identification with the celebrity as well as the mediating effect of social identification.
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paper_title: Determinants of Knowledge Sharing in Knowledge Networks: A Social Capital Perspective

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In knowledge networks, which are manifested in a variety of forms(e.g., CoPs), achieving organizational goals requires knowledge sharing between individuals in the networks. Therefore, identifying knowledgesharing determinants in these networks is a critical issue which is the purpose of this study. Since social capital theory highlights social relations between individuals and network structures, this theory is taken as a theoretical basis for this study. Appropriate keywords were extracted from literature to identify and collect knowledge-sharing determinants in knowledge networks based on social capital perspective. A quantitative context analysis method was adopted and keywords were selected to search in the research articles in scientific databases. The study identified 20 knowledge-sharing determinants in knowledge networks among 50 related articles which were classified based on social capital dimensions (structural, relational, and cognitive). Considering knowledge-sharing determinants may contribute to designing more effective knowledge networks, reducing knowledge-sharing barriers or motivating it between individuals. From the originality point of view for this paper, we can say that knowledge sharing determinants have been mentioned separately in previous studies, however, collecting and classifying these determinants, which may suggest useful implications for researchers and practitioners, is not given much attention in the literature. This paper tries to fill this research gap.
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paper_title: Customer loyalty through social networks: Lessons from Zara on Facebook

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Companies’ escalating investment in social media—in particular, in Facebook—has become reality. However, most firms still do not see social networks as a vehicle for cultivating and winning customer loyalty, but rather as a resource for creating brand awareness. In this article, we offer a different view. By examining fans and non-fans of the Zara brand on Facebook, we discovered that Facebook enhances the relations that increase loyalty via trust, customer satisfaction, perceived value, and commitment. Our results revealed that these relations are stronger for fans of the brand than for non-fans, and suggest that customer satisfaction is the strongest determinant of loyalty. This indicates a new opportunity for marketing managers to achieve customer loyalty: Facebook.
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paper_title: An Information Visualization System to Assist News Topics Exploration with Social Media

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With the popularity of social media, journalists often collect news materials from mass user-generated contents. However, with the increase of social media data, it is not easy for a journalist to see the whole picture of an event from the huge amount of data. If they only use the social media as a news source, the reported content may often become a copied view of the users, or fall into the stereotype of one-sided discussions. Aiming to find a solution to this problem, our study uses Twitter data as an example to develop an information system to assist journalists to explore events, collect materials, and find news topics through social media. We use network analysis and natural language processing techniques to analyze the collected data and visualize the story elements. We have developed four story elements models to support different ways of exploring the data. We let the users adjust the weight on the importance of these models to show the context of tweets and help users find news topics. We have designed a two-phase experiment with questionnaires to assess the appropriateness of the system. We allow the participants with various degrees of familiarity with the event to explore news topics on our system. The experimental results show that the participants have found the system to be useful and easy to use, and the journalists can explore news topics and track events in a much faster fashion.
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paper_title: Big Data and Visualization: Methods, Challenges and Technology Progress

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Big Data analytics plays a key role through reducing the data size and complexity in Big Data applications. Visualization is an important approach to helping Big Data get a complete view of data and discover data values. Big Data analytics and visualization should be integrated seamlessly so that they work best in Big Data applications. Conventional data visualization methods as well as the extension of some conventional methods to Big Data applications are introduced in this paper. The challenges of Big Data visualization are discussed. New methods, applications, and technology progress of Big Data visualization are presented.
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paper_title: Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix

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The emergence of Internet-based social media has made it possible for one person to communicate with hundreds or even thousands of other people about products and the companies that provide them. Thus, the impact of consumer-to-consumer communications has been greatly magnified in the marketplace. This article argues that social media is a hybrid element of the promotion mix because in a traditional sense it enables companies to talk to their customers, while in a nontraditional sense it enables customers to talk directly to one another. The content, timing, and frequency of the social media-based conversations occurring between consumers are outside managers' direct control. This stands in contrast to the traditional integrated marketing communications paradigm whereby a high degree of control is present. Therefore, managers must learn to shape consumer discussions in a manner that is consistent with the organization's mission and performance goals. Methods by which this can be accomplished are delineated herein. They include providing consumers with networking platforms, and using blogs, social media tools, and promotional tools to engage customers.
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paper_title: The role of social support on relationship quality and social commerce

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Empowered by social media, individuals are active content creators in social networking sites. This has brought new changes in business environment, of which social commerce is one of them. Social commerce, a new stream in e-commerce, highlights the role of technological advancements to develop a new social commerce era. In social commerce era, individuals share their knowledge, experiences, and information about the products and services with peers, providing a supportive environment in an online context. Drawn from social support theory, relationship quality, and social media concept this research proposes a model to investigate the role of social factors that impact on relationship quality and social commerce intention. A survey conducted on Facebook, a popular social networking site, and PLS-SEM method was applied to empirically test the proposed model. The results offer a valuable picture of social factors that influence relationship quality and social commerce intention. Towards these ends, the study highlights a new picture of consumers' behaviour in social commerce era. It provides a new theory in the area of research — social commerce. Practical implications of the research also highlight new technological changes in e-commerce platform and provide new strategies to firms to adopt these new technological advancements.
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paper_title: Water management: Current and future challenges and research directions: Water management research challenges

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Water distinguishes our planet compared to all the others we know about. While the global supply of available freshwater is more than adequate to meet all current and foreseeable water demands, its spatial and temporal distributions are not. There are many regions where our freshwater resources are inadequate to meet domestic, economic development and environmental needs. In such regions, the lack of adequate clean water to meet human drinking water and sanitation needs is indeed a constraint on human health and productivity and hence on economic development as well as on the maintenance of a clean environment and healthy ecosystems. All of us involved in research must find ways to remove these constraints. We face multiple challenges in doing that, especially given a changing and uncertain future climate, and a rapidly growing population that is driving increased social and economic development, globalization, and urbanization. How best to meet these challenges requires research in all aspects of water management. Since 1965, the journal Water Resources Research has played an important role in reporting and disseminating current research related to managing the quantity and quality and cost of this resource. This paper identifies the issues facing water managers today and future research needed to better inform those who strive to create a more sustainable and desirable future.
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paper_title: Twenty-Five Years of Hydroinformatics

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Hydroinformatics emerged in 1991 when numerical modelling of water expanded its range from one that was restricted to the modelling of flows to a much wider ranging sociotechnical discipline that supports stakeholders in addressing their water-related problems. However, despite numerous advances in hydroinformatics, the current practical and research effort is still very much technocratic (or techno-centric) which in turn may restrict the potential of hydroinformatics in its scope and its reach. This Special Issue, through the compilation of thirteen papers, illustrates some of the developments and applications in the field of hydroinformatics and marks the twenty-five years of its existence. We hope that this will help to further raise the awareness of the subject and its developments and applications. In the Editorial of this Special Issue, we briefly discuss the origin of hydroinformatics and we introduce the papers that are featuring in this Special Issue. We also give a way forward for future research and application.
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paper_title: Hydroinformatics and Data-Based Modelling Issues in Hydrology

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This chapter highlights and addresses some basic issues associated with data-based modeling. The chapter starts with a brief description of emergence and development of hydroinformatics as a potent segment of mainstream hydrology and proceeds to the ignored or least considered modeling queries existing in hydrology, e.g., how much benefit could be gained by increased complexity in data-based models or whether increased complexity adversely affects model performance. The chapter reminds one of the need to evaluate existing hypothetic assumptions on various modeling properties.
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paper_title: Hydroinformatics: Information Technology and the Aquatic Environment

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The nature and origins of hydroinformatics - towards a characterization of hydroinformatics - the first cycle further towards a characterization of of hydroinformatics - the second cycle from computational hydraulics to hydroinformatics towards the specification of a hydroinformatics system the commitment to abstraction the social dimensions of hydroinformatics - hydroinformatics and the natural environment the ecological dimension of hydroinformatics the Third-World dimension of hydroinformatics the European dimension of technology, and thus of hydroinformatics also the market realization of hydroinformatics the logics of hydroinformatics - the logic of hydroinformatics in the positivistic and empirical sense and the sense of dogmatic science a-logics and b-logics symbolic and sub-symbolic paradigms logics and numerics - the third cycle in the characterization of hydroinformatics. Appendix: the logics of numerical instability and undecidability concluding unscientific postscript.
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paper_title: Geo-social media as a proxy for hydrometeorological data for streamflow estimation and to improve flood monitoring

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Floods are one of the most devastating types of worldwide disasters in terms of human, economic, and social losses. If authoritative data is scarce, or unavailable for some periods, other sources of information are required to improve streamflow estimation and early flood warnings. Georeferenced social media messages are increasingly being regarded as an alternative source of information for coping with flood risks. However, existing studies have mostly concentrated on the links between geo-social media activity and flooded areas. Thus, there is still a gap in research with regard to the use of social media as a proxy for rainfall-runoff estimations and flood forecasting. To address this, we propose using a transformation function that creates a proxy variable for rainfall by analysing geo-social media messages and rainfall measurements from authoritative sources, which are later incorporated within a hydrological model for streamflow estimation. We found that the combined use of official rainfall values with the social media proxy variable as input for the Probability Distributed Model (PDM), improved streamflow simulations for flood monitoring. The combination of authoritative sources and transformed geo-social media data during flood events achieved a 71% degree of accuracy and a 29% underestimation rate in a comparison made with real streamflow measurements. This is a significant improvement on the respective values of 39% and 58%, achieved when only authoritative data were used for the modelling. This result is clear evidence of the potential use of derived geo-social media data as a proxy for environmental variables for improving flood early-warning systems.
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paper_title: Model Performance Sensitivity to Objective Function during Automated Calibrations

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AbstractPrevious studies have reported limitations of the efficiency criteria commonly used in hydrology to describe goodness of model simulations. This study examined sensitivity of model performance to the objective function used during automated calibrations. Nine widely used efficiency criteria were evaluated for their effectiveness as objective function, and goodness of the model predictions were examined using 13 criteria. Two cases (Case I: Using observed streamflow data and Case II: Using simulated streamflow) were considered to accomplish objectives of the study using a widely used watershed model (SWAT) and good-quality field data from a well-monitored experimental watershed. Major findings of the study include (1) automated calibration results are sensitive to the objective function group—group that work based on minimization of the absolute deviations (Group I), group that work based on minimization of square of the residuals (Group II), and groups that use log of the observed and simulated st...
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paper_title: Water management in mediterranean river basins: a comparison of management frameworks, physical impacts, and ecological responses

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Rivers in mediterranean climates have been extensively modified by water management infrastructure and practices, yet patterns of development and consequent effects on freshwater ecosystems have not been compared across multiple regions. To evaluate the influence of water management on mediterranean-climate rivers, we compare the historic progression of management policies, institutions, and ecosystem impacts in the Sacramento River (California, USA), Ebro River (Spain), and Biobio River (Chile) basins. There are broad similarities in patterns of ecosystem alterations related to the extensive development of dams and water management infrastructure in the three study basins. Flow regimes have been altered by the reduction of winter peak flows and increased summer baseflows. There are also common patterns of disturbance from sediment transport alteration, water quality degradation, and declines in freshwater biodiversity. Current approaches are inadequate for addressing the formidable water management challenges in California, Spain, and Chile, yet the dramatic evolution of water policies and institutions over the past 150 years suggests that further adaptation is possible. Advances toward integrated and sustainable water management models are likely to occur through incremental change, driven by growing awareness of climate change effects and public demands for water-use efficiency and improved environmental quality.
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paper_title: Community change: Water management through the use of social media, the case of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin

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Abstract Social media can influence behavior, disseminate knowledge and impact on social change during times of conflict. Communication literature is important when considering community members’ perception of priority areas of the media, however, limited attention has focused on communication theory in depth, through the use of Social Media. This qualitative study explores the Australian Government Department, The Murray-Darling Basin Authority, and their effective use of social media to engage with a community previously in conflict with the Government.
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paper_title: Smart Metering, Water Pricing and Social Media to Stimulate Residential Water Efficiency: Opportunities for the SmartH2O Project

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Abstract The SmartH2O project aims to provide water utilities, municipalities and citizens with an ICT enabled platform to design, develop and implement better water management policies using innovative metering, social media and pricing mechanisms. This project has as a working hypothesis that high data quality obtained from smart meters and communicable through social media and other forms of interaction could be used to design and implement innovative and effective water pricing policies. Planned case studies in the UK and Switzerland are introduced. We anticipate that SmartH20 research outcomes will be of use to those interested in linking smart metering, social media and smart pricing approaches to achieve more sustainable water management outcomes.
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paper_title: Domestic Water Charges in Ireland - Issues and Challenges Conveyed through Social Media

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This paper analyses a Twitter dataset to explore water governance and stakeholder engagement during the introduction of domestic water charges in Ireland. The results highlight active Twitter use during the analysis period, reflective of widespread protest centred on a new utility, Irish Water. The analysis shows protest activities were dispersed and not cohesive, with tweets largely focused on economic and political issues and not on the provision of a sustainable water supply. The findings extend our understanding of these events and provide some insights into the role of social media in water governance and stakeholder engagement issues in an Irish and wider context.
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paper_title: Flash flood forecasting : An ingredients-based methodology

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Abstract An approach to forecasting the potential for flash flood-producing storms is developed, using the notion of basic ingredients. Heavy precipitation is the result of sustained high rainfall rates. In turn, high rainfall rates involve the rapid ascent of air containing substantial water vapor and also depend on the precipitation efficiency. The duration of an event is associated with its speed of movement and the size of the system causing the event along the direction of system movement. This leads naturally to a consideration of the meteorological processes by which these basic ingredients are brought together. A description of those processes and of the types of heavy precipitation-producing storms suggests some of the variety of ways in which heavy precipitation occurs. Since the right mixture of these ingredients can be found in a wide variety of synoptic and mesoscale situations, it is necessary to know which of the ingredients is critical in any given case. By knowing which of the ingredients...
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paper_title: Citizens as Sensors: The World of Volunteered Geography

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In recent months there has been an explosion of interest in using the Web to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic information provided voluntarily by individuals. Sites such as Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap are empowering citizens to create a global patchwork of geographic information, while Google Earth and other virtual globes are encouraging volunteers to develop interesting applications using their own data. I review this phenomenon, and examine associated issues: what drives people to do this, how accurate are the results, will they threaten individual privacy, and how can they augment more conventional sources? I compare this new phenomenon to more traditional citizen science and the role of the amateur in geographic observation.
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paper_title: Ensemble flood forecasting: a review.

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Operational medium range flood forecasting systems are increasingly moving towards the adoption of ensembles of numerical weather predictions (NWP), known as ensemble prediction systems (EPS), to drive their predictions. We review the scientific drivers of this shift towards such ‘ensemble flood forecasting’ and discuss several of the questions surrounding best practice in using EPS in flood forecasting systems. We also review the literature evidence of the ‘added value’ of flood forecasts based on EPS and point to remaining key challenges in using EPS successfully.
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paper_title: Flood control management system for reservoirs

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Flooding disaster is one of the most damaging natural disasters in China, with annual average losses costing more than 200 billion yuan in recent years. After the 1995 floods in Liaohe River and the 1998 floods in Yangtze River, both national and local governments realized that flood control operation of reservoirs could play a major role in alleviating flood losses and that some enhancements in flood control management for reservoirs would be required. Since the existing flood control management systems for most reservoirs are established for specific purposes and are lacking in data sharing and communication with governments, it is very difficult for individual decision-making department to acquire real-time information within a short period. As a result, a national programme on flood control management system for reservoirs is undertaken. The paper is a summary of the outcome of the national programme about the flood control management system for reservoirs in China. The background, objectives, challenges and contents of the programme are presented. The main focus is on the integration of flood control management system for reservoirs as well as on the design of the flowchart of the system and its core components. The current system can be applied to either a river control center or a single reservoir through the use of the national standard databases. Hence, it will be readily integrated into the national flood control system in the future. An application example is shown for easy understanding of the system.
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paper_title: Probabilistic flood extent estimates from social media flood observations

paper_content:

Abstract. The increasing number and severity of floods, driven by phenomena such as urbanization, deforestation, subsidence and climate change, create a growing need for accurate and timely flood maps. In this paper we present and evaluate a method to create deterministic and probabilistic flood maps from Twitter messages that mention locations of flooding. A deterministic flood map created for the December 2015 flood in the city of York (UK) showed good performance (F(2) = 0.69; a statistic ranging from 0 to 1, with 1 expressing a perfect fit with validation data). The probabilistic flood maps we created showed that, in the York case study, the uncertainty in flood extent was mainly induced by errors in the precise locations of flood observations as derived from Twitter data. Errors in the terrain elevation data or in the parameters of the applied algorithm contributed less to flood extent uncertainty. Although these maps tended to overestimate the actual probability of flooding, they gave a reasonable representation of flood extent uncertainty in the area. This study illustrates that inherently uncertain data from social media can be used to derive information about flooding.
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paper_title: Bias correcting precipitation forecasts to improve the skill of seasonal streamflow forecasts

paper_content:

Abstract. Meteorological centres make sustained efforts to provide seasonal forecasts that are increasingly skilful, which has the potential to benefit streamflow forecasting. Seasonal streamflow forecasts can help to take anticipatory measures for a range of applications, such as water supply or hydropower reservoir operation and drought risk management. This study assesses the skill of seasonal precipitation and streamflow forecasts in France to provide insights into the way bias correcting precipitation forecasts can improve the skill of streamflow forecasts at extended lead times. We apply eight variants of bias correction approaches to the precipitation forecasts prior to generating the streamflow forecasts. The approaches are based on the linear scaling and the distribution mapping methods. A daily hydrological model is applied at the catchment scale to transform precipitation into streamflow. We then evaluate the skill of raw (without bias correction) and bias-corrected precipitation and streamflow ensemble forecasts in 16 catchments in France. The skill of the ensemble forecasts is assessed in reliability, sharpness, accuracy and overall performance. A reference prediction system, based on historical observed precipitation and catchment initial conditions at the time of forecast (i.e. ESP method) is used as benchmark in the computation of the skill. The results show that, in most catchments, raw seasonal precipitation and streamflow forecasts are often more skilful than the conventional ESP method in terms of sharpness. However, they are not significantly better in terms of reliability. Forecast skill is generally improved when applying bias correction. Two bias correction methods show the best performance for the studied catchments, each method being more successful in improving specific attributes of the forecasts: the simple linear scaling of monthly values contributes mainly to increasing forecast sharpness and accuracy, while the empirical distribution mapping of daily values is successful in improving forecast reliability.
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paper_title: Social media and disasters: a functional framework for social media use in disaster planning, response, and research

paper_content:

A comprehensive review of online, official, and scientific literature was carried out in 2012-13 to develop a framework of disaster social media. This framework can be used to facilitate the creation of disaster social media tools, the formulation of disaster social media implementation processes, and the scientific study of disaster social media effects. Disaster social media users in the framework include communities, government, individuals, organisations, and media outlets. Fifteen distinct disaster social media uses were identified, ranging from preparing and receiving disaster preparedness information and warnings and signalling and detecting disasters prior to an event to (re)connecting community members following a disaster. The framework illustrates that a variety of entities may utilise and produce disaster social media content. Consequently, disaster social media use can be conceptualised as occurring at a number of levels, even within the same disaster. Suggestions are provided on how the proposed framework can inform future disaster social media development and research. Language: en
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paper_title: Social Media as a Crisis Response : How is the water crisis in Cape Town dealt with on Twitter

paper_content:

In our interconnected world, social media is a vital tool for communication in the everyday life of individuals. The importance of social media in society has increased not only in times of peace, ...
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paper_title: Estimation of awareness and perception of water scarcity among farmers in the Guanzhong Plain, China, by means of a structural equation model

paper_content:

Abstract This paper applies a structural equation model (SEM) to analyze the formation of awareness and perception of water scarcity, based on a cross-sectional dataset of 446 farmers in the Guanzhong Plain, Shaanxi Province, China. We find that age, percentage of time spent on farming and social network are the main determinants of awareness. Water price and drought experience are the most important explanatory variables of perception. In addition, awareness and perception strongly interact. The results obtained in this paper are relevant for policymaking, since environmental behavior, which includes efficient use of natural resources, tends to improve if supported by internalization of social norms, which in its turn, is promoted by awareness and perception. From the analysis it follows that spreading information via social networks, rather than via the media, is an important vehicle to enhance awareness and perception and thus to improve irrigation water use efficiency. Special attention should be paid to part-time farmers who are limited in directly perceiving water scarcity. Finally, more use should be made of the price mechanism to strengthen perception and awareness.
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paper_title: Examining the role of social media in California’s drought risk management in 2014

paper_content:

Social media creates an interactive information communication platform for disaster preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. Recent research has analyzed the participation of social media in natural disasters, such as the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, Queensland floods from 2010 to 2011, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and Colorado flood in 2013, but little research has paid attention to drought risk management. In this study, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis method is used to evaluate the social media sites of governmental agencies that were directly involved in California’s Drought Task Force in the historic drought in 2014. The results show that state governmental agencies have used the popular social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) as communication channels with professional stakeholders and the general public. The major functions of social media in the California drought risk management process included one-way information sharing, two-way information sharing, situational awareness, rumor control, reconnection, and decision making. However, social media was not active in donation solicitation and volunteer management. The two-way communication still stayed in relatively surficial levels with limited comments and inadequate conversations. A gap existed to reconnect public social media domain and personal social networks, even though drought risk was closely related to everyone’s daily life. During the California drought in 2014, Facebook worked actively in two-way information sharing for drought risk information and water conservation strategies; YouTube was a robust platform that attracted large number of views on drought videos; and Twitter played an effective role in reconnection of social networks to expedite drought risk information dissemination. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
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paper_title: Understanding 2016 Drought in India by Social Media Data Mining

paper_content:

Drought is natural Biohazard, which result due to deficiency of rainfall for consecutive years. It can last for a few months to a year. It produces short term to long term impact on human society. Understanding of impact of drought can provide great help for disaster management and rehabilitation, It can also provide a way to understanding society and it issue. Social media data mining can aid more effectively and faster study of drought. This paper puts focus on the impact of drought in India 2016.
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paper_title: Drought and declining reservoirs: Comparing media discourse in Arizona and New Mexico, 2002–2004

paper_content:

Abstract Media discourses about drought impacts on lakes and reservoirs in Arizona and New Mexico between 2002 and 2004 are compared to show how discursive contexts shape the framing of drought in temporal and spatial scales. Discursive contexts in the two states are shaped by their cultural and political histories and the differential development of water delivery infrastructures. Quantitative mapping of keywords in the states’ main newspapers shows how New Mexico experienced more conflict and Arizona more surprise about the drought. Qualitative case studies link these patterns to variation in framing between the states. In particular, the shorter temporal scale in New Mexico is linked to a greater sense of emergency, while the longer temporal scale in Arizona reflects the buffering of urban populations from drought through water delivery infrastructure. The finer spatial scale in Arizona, focusing on urban concerns, reflects an established infrastructure of reservoirs while the broader spatial scale in New Mexico, incorporating both rural and urban concerns, reflects a less developed physical infrastructure and greater prevalence of water rights conflicts. This study illustrates the usefulness of a multifaceted approach to the study of media discourse.
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paper_title: Droughts and their social perception in the mass media (southern Spain)

paper_content:

In the Mediterranean environment, drought is one of the extreme phenomena that has most direct consequences and complexity. It also has a direct social impact through the mass media, whose analysis, typology and characterization should be a priority in strategies to plan and mitigate effects. The appearance of droughts is slow, their occurrence is often not recognized until human activity and the environment have already been significantly affected, and drought effects persist for a long time after the drought has ended. The spatial distribution of droughts is highly complex, and significant variation in drought conditions is common between different locations. This makes it difficult to identify similar regions, especially in areas of climate transition, where the atmospheric influences are complex. This is the situation in the Iberian Peninsula (particularly the south of the peninsula), which straddles both temperate and sub-tropical climates and in which precipitation is highly variable and spatial variability is substantial. In this study, we analysed rainfall anomalies (Standardized Precipitation Index, SPI) over the last 50 years at four representative meteorological stations in southern Spain, two on the coast (Malaga and Algarrobo) and two at the headwaters of river basins regulated by dams (Antequera and Periana). The aims of the study were to (1) analyse the types of drought, and their frequency and intensity and (2) establish the dynamics and evolution of the social perception of droughts in the context of global change, brought about by the communications media. The results showed the SPI was a useful tool for identifying dry anomalies that may feature in our field of study of meteorological and hydrological drought, depending on its duration. Meteorological drought impact on the eco-geomorphological system is common and has had a particular development since the 1980s. Hydrological droughts are those that have had the greatest effect on water reserves, particularly when they occur in the headwaters of the watershed covered by reservoirs. Their importance has increased since the 1980s. Determination of drought periods and its impact mass media could have extraordinary relevance as a mechanism to establish the levels of awareness on sustainable use of resources. For future research, other socioeconomic and demographic variables should be considered to know the link between drought and water deficit. Copyright © 2012 Royal Meteorological Society
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paper_title: Exploring Ways Social Media Data Inform Public Issues Communication: An Analysis of Twitter Conversation During the 2012-2013 Drought in Nebraska

paper_content:

Social networking sites often are used to maintain close social ties, but increasingly they are used for information and news dissemination, specif ically about major events and crises. In 2012, a historic drought struck the Midwest, destroying or damaging portions of major f ield crops in major agricultural production states. By the end of August 2012, 90% of Nebraska was declared in extreme or exceptional drought, leading to bans on irrigation, damaged crops, and record-low yields as well as damaging the state’s leading economic sector. This case study used social media monitoring and analysis to explore online Twitter conversations related to this historic drought in Nebraska during a one-year period. Researchers determined Twitter conversations increased in quantity as drought conditions worsened, and agricultural issues, environmental impact, extreme weather, effects on the public, and proposals of solutions to address drought were dominant themes among conversations. Twitter served as a news outlet for information and updates about drought conditions, and it contained information from local, national and international sources. The researchers suggest an opportunity exists for educational institutions and organizations to serve as leaders on social media and in social networks to disseminate timely and relevant information related to important public issues, while also monitoring and participating in surrounding discussions. Specif ically, attention should be paid by public institutions to building brand equity through the use of concept marketing, audience engagement, use of big data, and thinking personally — strategies that have served private corporations well in monitoring issues of importance to their audiences.
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paper_title: A framework for a joint hydro-meteorological-social analysis of drought.

paper_content:

This article presents an innovative framework for analysing environmental governance challenges by focusing on their Drivers, Responses and Impacts (DRI). It builds on and modifies the widely applied Drivers, Pressures, States, Impacts and Responses (DPSIR) model. It suggests, firstly and most importantly, that the various temporal and spatial scales at which Drivers, Responses and Impacts operate should be included in the DRI conceptual framework. Secondly, the framework focuses on Drivers, Impacts and Responses in order to provide a parsimonious account of a drought system that can be informed by a range of social science, humanities and science data. 'Pressures' are therefore considered as a sub-category of 'Drivers'. 'States' are a sub-category of 'Impacts'. Thirdly, and most fundamentally in order to facilitate cross-disciplinary research of droughts, the DRI framework defines each of its elements, 'Drivers', 'Pressures', 'States', 'Impacts' and 'Responses' as capable of being shaped by both linked natural and social factors. This is different from existing DPSIR models which often see 'Responses' and 'Impacts' as located mainly in the social world, while 'States' are considered to be states within the natural environment only. The article illustrates this argument through an application of the DRI framework to the 1976 and 2003-6 droughts. The article also starts to address how - in cross-disciplinary research that encompasses physical and social sciences - claims about relationships between Drivers as well as Impacts of and Responses to drought over time can be methodologically justified. While the DRI framework has been inductively developed out of research on droughts we argue that it can be applied to a range of environmental governance challenges.
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paper_title: Statistical approaches used to assess and redesign surface water-quality-monitoring networks.

paper_content:

An up-to-date review of the statistical approaches utilized for the assessment and redesign of surface water quality monitoring (WQM) networks is presented. The main technical aspects of network design are covered in four sections, addressing monitoring objectives, water quality variables, sampling frequency and spatial distribution of sampling locations. This paper discusses various monitoring objectives and related procedures used for the assessment and redesign of long-term surface WQM networks. The appropriateness of each approach for the design, contraction or expansion of monitoring networks is also discussed. For each statistical approach, its advantages and disadvantages are examined from a network design perspective. Possible methods to overcome disadvantages and deficiencies in the statistical approaches that are currently in use are recommended.
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paper_title: Monitoring Environmental Quality by Sniffing Social Media

paper_content:

Nowadays, the environmental pollution and degradation in China has become a serious problem with the rapid development of Chinese heavy industry and increased energy generation. With sustainable development being the key to solving these problems, it is necessary to develop proper techniques for monitoring environmental quality. Compared to traditional environment monitoring methods utilizing expensive and complex instruments, we recognized that social media analysis is an efficient and feasible alternative to achieve this goal with the phenomenon that a growing number of people post their comments and feelings about their living environment on social media, such as blogs and personal websites. In this paper, we self-defined a term called the Environmental Quality Index (EQI) to measure and represent people’s overall attitude and sentiment towards an area’s environmental quality at a specific time; it includes not only metrics for water and food quality but also people’s feelings about air pollution. In the experiment, a high sentiment analysis and classification precision of 85.67% was obtained utilizing the support vector machine algorithm, and we calculated and analyzed the EQI for 27 provinces in China using the text data related to the environment from the Chinese Sina micro-blog and Baidu Tieba collected from January 2015 to June 2016. By comparing our results to with the data from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), we showed that the environment evaluation model we constructed and the method we proposed are feasible and effective.
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paper_title: An Integrated WebGIS Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information and Social Media in Soil and Water Conservation

paper_content:

Volunteered geographic information and social networking in a WebGIS has the potential to increase public participation in soil and water conservation, promote environmental awareness and change, and provide timely data that may be otherwise unavailable to policymakers in soil and water conservation management. The objectives of this study were: (1) to develop a framework for combining current technologies, computing advances, data sources, and social media; and (2) develop and test an online web mapping interface. The mapping interface integrates Microsoft Silverlight, Bing Maps, ArcGIS Server, Google Picasa Web Albums Data API, RSS, Google Analytics, and Facebook to create a rich user experience. The website allows the public to upload photos and attributes of their own subdivisions or sites they have identified and explore other submissions. The website was made available to the public in early February 2011 at http://www.AbandonedDevelopments.com and evaluated for its potential long-term success in a pilot study.
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paper_title: Monitoring surface water quality using social media in the context of citizen science

paper_content:

Surface water quality monitoring (SWQM) provides essential information for water environmental protection. However, SWQM is costly and limited in terms of equipment and sites. The global popularity of social media and intelligent mobile devices with GPS and photography functions allows citizens to monitor surface water quality. This study aims to propose a method for SWQM using social media platforms. Specifically, a WeChat-based application platform is built to collect water quality reports from volunteers, which have been proven valuable for water quality monitoring. The methods for data screening and volunteer recruitment are discussed based on the collected reports. The proposed methods provide a framework for collecting water quality data from citizens and offer a primary foundation for big data analysis in future research.
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paper_title: Globalization and Localization: An Economic Approach

paper_content:

The aim of this chapter is to assess, from an economic perspective, ways in which actual globalization is likely to affect disaster vulnerability. We approach the issue by putting forward an economic concept of disaster localization. It is first shown that a localized disaster is unlikely to affect the macroeconomy in any significant way. In addition, development tends to make all disasters localized as an incidental consequence of its endogenous and exogenous processes. The people and activities directly affected by a disaster may still undergo severe difficulties, but these are likely to be less intense and more rapidly counteracted in countries with higher levels of integration, diversification, and general development. That is, as economic resilience and economic disaster confinement increase, disaster vulnerability is bound to decrease. However, the effect of current globalization on vulnerability seems to be double edged. On the one hand, globalization is likely to speed up the downgrading of vulnerability at the national level by helping to upgrade localization. On the other, however, at least in the short and medium terms, globalization may increase vulnerability at the local level by disenfranchising communities and individuals as well as adding new sources of economic instability. Does globalization help the process of disaster localization? Is current globalization beneficial for the people and activities that can be directly affected by a potential disaster? In other words, we look at the ways in which the main economic features of actual globalization might affect disaster vulnerability, at national and local levels.1
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paper_title: Monitoring Environmental Quality by Sniffing Social Media

paper_content:

Nowadays, the environmental pollution and degradation in China has become a serious problem with the rapid development of Chinese heavy industry and increased energy generation. With sustainable development being the key to solving these problems, it is necessary to develop proper techniques for monitoring environmental quality. Compared to traditional environment monitoring methods utilizing expensive and complex instruments, we recognized that social media analysis is an efficient and feasible alternative to achieve this goal with the phenomenon that a growing number of people post their comments and feelings about their living environment on social media, such as blogs and personal websites. In this paper, we self-defined a term called the Environmental Quality Index (EQI) to measure and represent people’s overall attitude and sentiment towards an area’s environmental quality at a specific time; it includes not only metrics for water and food quality but also people’s feelings about air pollution. In the experiment, a high sentiment analysis and classification precision of 85.67% was obtained utilizing the support vector machine algorithm, and we calculated and analyzed the EQI for 27 provinces in China using the text data related to the environment from the Chinese Sina micro-blog and Baidu Tieba collected from January 2015 to June 2016. By comparing our results to with the data from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), we showed that the environment evaluation model we constructed and the method we proposed are feasible and effective.
---
paper_title: An Integrated WebGIS Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information and Social Media in Soil and Water Conservation

paper_content:

Volunteered geographic information and social networking in a WebGIS has the potential to increase public participation in soil and water conservation, promote environmental awareness and change, and provide timely data that may be otherwise unavailable to policymakers in soil and water conservation management. The objectives of this study were: (1) to develop a framework for combining current technologies, computing advances, data sources, and social media; and (2) develop and test an online web mapping interface. The mapping interface integrates Microsoft Silverlight, Bing Maps, ArcGIS Server, Google Picasa Web Albums Data API, RSS, Google Analytics, and Facebook to create a rich user experience. The website allows the public to upload photos and attributes of their own subdivisions or sites they have identified and explore other submissions. The website was made available to the public in early February 2011 at http://www.AbandonedDevelopments.com and evaluated for its potential long-term success in a pilot study.
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paper_title: Environmental flows and the European Water Framework Directive

paper_content:

Summary ::: 1. Environmental flows is now a widely accepted term that covers the quantity, timing, duration, frequency and quality of water flows required to sustain freshwater, estuarine and near-shore ecosystems and the human livelihoods and well-being that depend on them. ::: ::: 2. The Water Framework Directive (WFD) of the European Union does not use the term environmental flows explicitly, but requires member states to achieve good ecological status (GES) in all waterbodies, which is assessed by reference to aquatic biology. Nevertheless, it is accepted that ecologically appropriate hydrological regimes are necessary to meet this status. Implementing environmental flows will be a key measure for restoring and managing river ecosystems. ::: ::: 3. The WFD explicitly requires stakeholder involvement, but this has been interpreted as largely a dissemination exercise by national government agencies. Stakeholders are no longer involved in negotiation over ecological objectives as these are pre-set in the WFD. However, stakeholders may be more involved in reviewing standards and agreeing to measures to restore river ecosystems to the status required by the WFD. ::: ::: 4. The U.K. has undertaken two major projects to set environmental standards for water resources (i) to define water abstraction limits that maintain a healthy river ecosystem and (ii) to define ecologically appropriate flow releases from reservoirs. ::: ::: 5. Implementation of environmental flows remains a major issue, but new ideas such as time-limited licences and licence trading are being tried.
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paper_title: Case analysis of capability deployment in crisis prevention and response

paper_content:

Abstract The topic of effective crisis prevention and response is attracting significant interests from corporations and governments. It is evident that the nature within any crisis is unpredictable, erratic and difficult to prevent. Organizations are therefore preparing for unexpected events by outlining their crisis response strategies. The fact that crises may not repeat themselves and a given crisis solution might not be directly applicable to another crisis represents radical shifts in routines. As such, an organization may have to improvise when putting together a set of resources and capabilities for a response. This case study complements existing crisis management research that emphasizes both prevention and response by focusing on how an organization may adapt and deploy resources and capabilities accordingly. To meet the objective, the research draws upon an in-depth case study of Singapore's response tothe Asian Tsunami disaster in 2004. Our findings offer a useful contribution to organizations’ knowledge of mobilizing resources and capabilities during dynamic crisis situations. The case concludes with several research and practical implications.
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paper_title: Freshwater as shared between society and ecosystems: from divided approaches to integrated challenges

paper_content:

The paper has its focus on water's key functions behind ecosystem dynamics and the water–related balancing involved in a catchment–based ecosystem approach. A conceptual framework is being developed to address fundamental trade–offs between humans and ecosystems. This is done by paying attention to society's unavoidable landscape modifications and their unavoidable ecological effects mediated by water processes. Because the coevolution of societal and environmental processes indicates resonance rather than a cause–effect relationship, humanity will have to learn to live with change while securing ecosystem resilience. In view of the partial incompatibility of the social imperative of the millennium goals and its environmental sustainability goal, human activities and ecosystems have to be orchestrated for compatibility. To this end a catchment–based approach has to be taken by integrating water, land use and ecosystems. It is being suggested that ecosystem protection has to be thought of in two scales: site–specific biotic landscape components to be protected for their social value, and a catchment–based ecosystem approach to secure sustainable supply of crucial ecosystem goods and services on which social and economic development depends.
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paper_title: Monitoring surface water quality using social media in the context of citizen science

paper_content:

Surface water quality monitoring (SWQM) provides essential information for water environmental protection. However, SWQM is costly and limited in terms of equipment and sites. The global popularity of social media and intelligent mobile devices with GPS and photography functions allows citizens to monitor surface water quality. This study aims to propose a method for SWQM using social media platforms. Specifically, a WeChat-based application platform is built to collect water quality reports from volunteers, which have been proven valuable for water quality monitoring. The methods for data screening and volunteer recruitment are discussed based on the collected reports. The proposed methods provide a framework for collecting water quality data from citizens and offer a primary foundation for big data analysis in future research.
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paper_title: The Flint, Michigan, Water Crisis: A Case Study in Regulatory Failure and Environmental Injustice

paper_content:

Abstract The Flint water crisis highlights numerous regulatory failures related to federal drinking water regulation, interpretation, and enforcement. The events that unfolded in Michigan, from the initial utilization of a corrosive water source to provide Flint's drinking water to the inadequate response of numerous regulators, demonstrate how the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) can be wrongly interpreted, implemented, and weakly enforced, leading to dangerous exposure to unsafe drinking water. Our objective is to discuss these regulatory failures in Michigan in 2014–2015 in the context of other reported incidents of U.S. cities with high levels of lead in drinking water. Like the people of Flint, many of the affected residents are living in economically depressed areas with high rates of racial minorities. The recurring trend of unsafe drinking water in communities with this demographic profile qualifies this as an issue of environmental injustice.
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paper_title: A network analysis of official Twitter accounts during the West Virginia water crisis

paper_content:

Online networks using Web 2.0 technologies have proven useful for communication among all parties involved in managing crises. These networks rapidly disseminate information allowing for coordination among organizations responding to the needs of those whose safety and wellbeing are threatened by the crisis and its aftermath. This study provides a network analysis of official Twitter accounts activated during the Charleston, West Virginia, water contamination crisis in 2014. The city's water supply was rendered unfit for drinking or bathing after 7500 gallons of a toxic chemical leaked into the Elk River. The network created by the 41 Twitter accounts associated with the West Virginia water contamination lacked density, contained several isolates, exchanged information quickly (geodesic distance diameter), and contained both national and local accounts. The lack of density indicates limited exchange of information, particularly between national and federal accounts. The rapid dissemination of the information that was shared and the fact that some accounts did bridge the local and national gap, however, show the positive potential for such networks in responding to crises. We analyzed a Twitter network of 41 accounts related to the W.V. water crisis.We examined the network in the context of rapid dissemination of info in a crisis.The networks density is lower than ideal from a crisis communication perspective.There are 2 factions: national level organizations and W.V. organizations.
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paper_title: Framework for Social Media Big Data Quality Analysis

paper_content:

Unlimited amount of unstructured data is being captured and analyzed over social media. The paper highlights the issue of lack of standard quality control approaches that could be utilized for all social media sites. This is due to the variety of formats of big data acceptable over these sites. The issue reveals a challenge not only in the capture of big data but also in the analysis and yield of valuable data, which affect decision-making. The paper reviews a collection of archived documents in the field of big data and social media. This paper presents a framework identifying the issues of quality analysis of big data on social media, examining current techniques used by social media companies to capture and analyze big data, and mapping social media sites and the appropriate combinations of big data capture and analysis techniques with the data quality control requirements.
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paper_title: Mining Twitter Data with Resource Constraints

paper_content:

Social media analysis constitutes a scientific field that is rapidly gaining ground due to its numerous research challenges and practical applications, as well as the unprecedented availability of data in real time. Several of these applications have significant social and economical impact, such as journalism, crisis management, advertising, etc. However, two issues regarding these applications have to be confronted. The first one is the financial cost. Despite the abundance of information, it typically comes at a premium price, and only a fraction is provided free of charge. For example, Twitter, a predominant social media online service, grants researchers and practitioners free access to only a small proportion (1%) of its publicly available stream. The second issue is the computational cost. Even when the full stream is available, off the shelf approaches are unable to operate in such settings due to the real-time computational demands. Consequently, real world applications as well as research efforts that exploit such information are limited to utilizing only a subset of the available data. In this paper, we are interested in evaluating the extent to which analytical processes are affected by the aforementioned limitation. In particular, we apply a plethora of analysis processes on two subsets of Twitter public data, obtained through the service's sampling API's. The first one is the default 1% sample, whereas the second is the Garden hose sample that our research group has access to, returning 10% of all public data. We extensively evaluate their relative performance in numerous scenarios.
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paper_title: Quality management architecture for social media data

paper_content:

Social media data has provided various insights into the behaviour of consumers and businesses. However, extracted data may be erroneous, or could have originated from a malicious source. Thus, quality of social media should be managed. Also, it should be understood how data quality can be managed across a big data pipeline, which may consist of several processing and analysis phases. The contribution of this paper is evaluation of data quality management architecture for social media data. The theoretical concepts based on previous work have been implemented for data quality evaluation of Twitter-based data sets. Particularly, reference architecture for quality management in social media data has been extended and evaluated based on the implementation architecture. Experiments indicate that 150–800 tweets/s can be evaluated with two cloud nodes depending on the configuration.
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paper_title: Big data and quality: A literature review

paper_content:

Big Data refers to data volumes in the range of Exabyte (1018) and beyond. Such volumes exceed the capacity of current on-line storage and processing systems. With characteristics like volume, velocity and variety big data throws challenges to the traditional IT establishments. Computer assisted innovation, real time data analytics, customer-centric business intelligence, industry wide decision making and transparency are possible advantages, to mention few, of Big Data. There are many issues with Big Data that warrant quality assessment methods. The issues are pertaining to storage and transport, management, and processing. This paper throws light into the present state of quality issues related to Big Data. It provides valuable insights that can be used to leverage Big Data science activities.
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paper_title: The Challenges of Data Quality and Data Quality Assessment in the Big Data Era

paper_content:

High-quality data are the precondition for analyzing and using big data and for guaranteeing the value of the data. Currently, comprehensive analysis and research of quality standards and quality assessment methods for big data are lacking. First, this paper summarizes reviews of data quality research. Second, this paper analyzes the data characteristics of the big data environment, presents quality challenges faced by big data, and formulates a hierarchical data quality framework from the perspective of data users. This framework consists of big data quality dimensions, quality characteristics, and quality indexes. Finally, on the basis of this framework, this paper constructs a dynamic assessment process for data quality. This process has good expansibility and adaptability and can meet the needs of big data quality assessment. The research results enrich the theoretical scope of big data and lay a solid foundation for the future by establishing an assessment model and studying evaluation algorithms.
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paper_title: Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective

paper_content:

Social media for news consumption is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its low cost, easy access, and rapid dissemination of information lead people to seek out and consume news from social media. On the other hand, it enables the wide spread of "fake news", i.e., low quality news with intentionally false information. The extensive spread of fake news has the potential for extremely negative impacts on individuals and society. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research that is attracting tremendous attention. Fake news detection on social media presents unique characteristics and challenges that make existing detection algorithms from traditional news media ineffective or not applicable. First, fake news is intentionally written to mislead readers to believe false information, which makes it difficult and nontrivial to detect based on news content; therefore, we need to include auxiliary information, such as user social engagements on social media, to help make a determination. Second, exploiting this auxiliary information is challenging in and of itself as users' social engagements with fake news produce data that is big, incomplete, unstructured, and noisy. Because the issue of fake news detection on social media is both challenging and relevant, we conducted this survey to further facilitate research on the problem. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of detecting fake news on social media, including fake news characterizations on psychology and social theories, existing algorithms from a data mining perspective, evaluation metrics and representative datasets. We also discuss related research areas, open problems, and future research directions for fake news detection on social media.
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paper_title: News use across social media platforms 2016

paper_content:

As part of an ongoing examination of social media platforms and news, the Pew Research Centre has found that a majority of adults in the United States – 62% or around two thirds – access their news on social media, with 18% doing so often. The researchers analysed the scope and characteristics of social media news consumers across nine social networking sites, with Facebook coming out on top. News plays a varying role across the social networking sites studied. The survey shows that two-thirds of Facebook users (66%) access news on the site, nearly six-in-ten Twitter users (59%) access news on Twitter, and seven-in-ten Reddit users get news on that platform. On Tumblr, the figure sits at 31%, while for the other five social networking sites it is true of only about one-fifth or less of their user bases. Addressing the issue of news audiences overlapping on social media platforms, the researchers found that of those who access news using at least one of the sites, a majority (64%) access news on just one – most commonly Facebook. About a quarter (26%) get news on two social media sites. Just one-in-ten access news on three or more sites. The study is based on a survey conducted between 12 January and 8 February 2016 with 4,654 members of the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.
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paper_title: Faking Sandy: characterizing and identifying fake images on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy

paper_content:

In today's world, online social media plays a vital role during real world events, especially crisis events. There are both positive and negative effects of social media coverage of events, it can be used by authorities for effective disaster management or by malicious entities to spread rumors and fake news. The aim of this paper, is to highlight the role of Twitter, during Hurricane Sandy (2012) to spread fake images about the disaster. We identified 10,350 unique tweets containing fake images that were circulated on Twitter, during Hurricane Sandy. We performed a characterization analysis, to understand the temporal, social reputation and influence patterns for the spread of fake images. Eighty six percent of tweets spreading the fake images were retweets, hence very few were original tweets. Our results showed that top thirty users out of 10,215 users (0.3%) resulted in 90% of the retweets of fake images; also network links such as follower relationships of Twitter, contributed very less (only 11%) to the spread of these fake photos URLs. Next, we used classification models, to distinguish fake images from real images of Hurricane Sandy. Best results were obtained from Decision Tree classifier, we got 97% accuracy in predicting fake images from real. Also, tweet based features were very effective in distinguishing fake images tweets from real, while the performance of user based features was very poor. Our results, showed that, automated techniques can be used in identifying real images from fake images posted on Twitter.
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paper_title: Social Media as a Crisis Response : How is the water crisis in Cape Town dealt with on Twitter

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In our interconnected world, social media is a vital tool for communication in the everyday life of individuals. The importance of social media in society has increased not only in times of peace, ...
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paper_title: A Drinking Water Crisis in Lake Taihu, China: Linkage to Climatic Variability and Lake Management

paper_content:

In late May, 2007, a drinking water crisis took place in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China, following a massive bloom of the toxin producing cyanobacteria Microcystis spp. in Lake Taihu, China’s third largest freshwater lake. Taihu was the city’s sole water supply, leaving approximately two million people without drinking water for at least a week. This cyanobacterial bloom event began two months earlier than previously documented for Microcystis blooms in Taihu. This was attributed to an unusually warm spring. The prevailing wind direction during this period caused the bloom to accumulate at the shoreline near the intake of the water plant. Water was diverted from the nearby Yangtze River in an effort to flush the lake of the bloom. However, this management action was counterproductive, because it produced a current which transported the bloom into the intake, exacerbating the drinking water contamination problem. The severity of this microcystin toxin containing bloom and the ensuing drinking water crisis were attributable to excessive nutrient enrichment; however, a multi-annual warming trend extended the bloom period and amplified its severity, and this was made worse by unanticipated negative impacts of water management. Long-term management must therefore consider both the human and climatic factors controlling these blooms and their impacts on water supply in this and other large lakes threatened by accelerating eutrophication.
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paper_title: Twitter mood predicts the stock market

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Behavioral economics tells us that emotions can profoundly affect individual behavior and decision-making. Does this also apply to societies at large, i.e. can societies experience mood states that affect their collective decision making? By extension is the public mood correlated or even predictive of economic indicators? Here we investigate whether measurements of collective mood states derived from large-scale Twitter feeds are correlated to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over time. We analyze the text content of daily Twitter feeds by two mood tracking tools, namely OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) that measures mood in terms of 6 dimensions (Calm, Alert, Sure, Vital, Kind, and Happy). We cross-validate the resulting mood time series by comparing their ability to detect the public's response to the presidential election and Thanksgiving day in 2008. A Granger causality analysis and a Self-Organizing Fuzzy Neural Network are then used to investigate the hypothesis that public mood states, as measured by the OpinionFinder and GPOMS mood time series, are predictive of changes in DJIA closing values. Our results indicate that the accuracy of DJIA predictions can be significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public mood dimensions but not others. We find an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA and a reduction of the Mean Average Percentage Error by more than 6%. Index Terms—stock market prediction — twitter — mood analysis.
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paper_title: The spread of true and false news online

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We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.
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paper_title: Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud

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Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision-making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit review fraud on the popular review platform Yelp, using two complementary approaches and datasets. We begin by analyzing restaurant reviews that are identified by Yelp's filtering algorithm as suspicious, or fake ? and treat these as a proxy for review fraud (an assumption we provide evidence for). We present four main findings. First, roughly 16% of restaurant reviews on Yelp are filtered. These reviews tend to be more extreme (favorable or unfavorable) than other reviews, and the prevalence of suspicious reviews has grown significantly over time. Second, a restaurant is more likely to commit review fraud when its reputation is weak, i.e., when it has few reviews, or it has recently received bad reviews. Third, chain restaurants ? which benefit less from Yelp ? are also less likely to commit review fraud. Fourth, when restaurants face increased competition, they become more likely to receive unfavorable fake reviews. Using a separate dataset, we analyze businesses that were caught soliciting fake reviews through a sting conducted by Yelp. These data support our main results, and shed further light on the economic incentives behind a business's decision to leave fake reviews.
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paper_title: Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing

paper_content:

The Boston Marathon bombing story unfolded on every possible carrier of information available in the spring of 2013, including Twitter. As information spread, it was filled with rumors (unsubstantiated information), and many of these rumors contained misinformation. Earlier studies have suggested that crowdsourced information flows can correct misinformation, and our research investigates this proposition. This exploratory research examines three rumors, later demonstrated to be false, that circulated on Twitter in the aftermath of the bombings. Our findings suggest that corrections to the misinformation emerge but are muted compared with the propagation of the misinformation. The similarities and differences we observe in the patterns of the misinformation and corrections contained within the stream over the days that followed the attacks suggest directions for possible research strategies to automatically detect misinformation.
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paper_title: Fighting against water crisis in China—A glimpse of water regime shift at county level

paper_content:

Abstract Three decades of economy growth and urbanization has brought China into the rim of water crisis. Transition to sustainability has gained consensus and put into practice at all administrative levels. However, due to locking mechanisms such as sunken investments, vested interests, and economic structure, such transition would not prove to be easy. Here we adopt the Multi-Level Perspective framework to analyze a county level water regime shift in Yiwu of Zhejiang province, which is representative for its economic success and severity of water problem in China. The transition is described as the interactions between water regime subsystems including society, economy, administration, infrastructure, and natural water cycling process, as well as the influence from the landscape level such as politics. Figures show that the water system is making a turnaround to the better side, while the government plays a key role in pushing and managing the transition. This study allows us to have a glimpse of the whole water regime transition currently happening in China, as well as being used for reference in other parts of the developing world, for the promoting of sustainable water resource management.
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paper_title: Social Media and User Privacy

paper_content:

Online users generate tremendous amounts of data. To better serve users, it is required to share the user-related data among researchers, advertisers and application developers. Publishing such data would raise more concerns on user privacy. To encourage data sharing and mitigate user privacy concerns, a number of anonymization and de-anonymization algorithms have been developed to help protect privacy of users. This paper reviews my doctoral research on online users privacy specifically in social media. In particular, I propose a new adversarial attack specialized for social media data. I further provide a principled way to assess effectiveness of anonymizing different aspects of social media data. My work sheds light on new privacy risks in social media data due to innate heterogeneity of user-generated data.
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paper_title: Privacy-Aware Framework for Matching Online Social Identities in Multiple Social Networking Services

paper_content:

With various emerging Social Networking Services (SNS), it is possible for users to join multiple SNS for social relationships with other users and to collect a large amount of information (e.g., statuses on Facebook and tweets on Twitter). However, these users have been facing difficulties in managing all the data collected from the multiple SNS. It is important to match social identities from the multiple SNS. In this study, we propose a privacy-aware framework for a social identity matching (SIM) method across these multiple SNS. It means that the proposed approach can protect user privacy, because only the public information (e.g., username and the social relationships of the users) is employed to find the best matches between social identities. As a result, we have shown by evaluation that the F-measure of the proposed SIM method is about 60%.
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paper_title: Privacy-Preserving Social Media Data Outsourcing

paper_content:

User-generated social media data are exploding and of high demand in public and private sectors. The disclosure of intact social media data exacerbates the threats to user privacy. In this paper, we first identify a text-based user-linkage attack on current data outsourcing practices, in which the real users in an anonymized dataset can be pinpointed based on the users' unprotected text data. Then we propose a framework for differentially privacy-preserving social media data outsourcing for the first time in literature. Within our framework, social media data service providers can outsource perturbed datasets to provide users differential privacy while offering high data utility to social media data consumers. Our differential privacy mechanism is based on a novel notion of E - text indistinguishability, which we propose to thwart the text-based user-linkage attack. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets confirm that our framework can enable high-level differential privacy protection and also high data utility.
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paper_title: Water Security: Research Challenges and Opportunities

paper_content:

An estimated 80% of the world's population faces a high-level water security or water-related biodiversity risk ( 1 ). The issue of water security—defined as an acceptable level of water-related risks to humans and ecosystems, coupled with the availability of water of sufficient quantity and quality to support livelihoods, national security, human health, and ecosystem services ( 2 , 3 )—is thus receiving considerable attention. To date, however, the majority of academic research on water security is relatively poorly integrated with the needs of policy-makers and practitioners; hence, substantial changes to funding, education, research frameworks, and academic incentive structures are required if researchers are to be enabled to make more substantive contributions to addressing the global water crisis.
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paper_title: Social big data: Recent achievements and new challenges

paper_content:

The paper presents the methodologies on information fusion for social media.The methodologies, frameworks, and software used to work with big data are given.The state of the art in the data analytic techniques on social big data is provided.Social big data applications for various domains are described and analyzed. Big data has become an important issue for a large number of research areas such as data mining, machine learning, computational intelligence, information fusion, the semantic Web, and social networks. The rise of different big data frameworks such as Apache Hadoop and, more recently, Spark, for massive data processing based on the MapReduce paradigm has allowed for the efficient utilisation of data mining methods and machine learning algorithms in different domains. A number of libraries such as Mahout and SparkMLib have been designed to develop new efficient applications based on machine learning algorithms. The combination of big data technologies and traditional machine learning algorithms has generated new and interesting challenges in other areas as social media and social networks. These new challenges are focused mainly on problems such as data processing, data storage, data representation, and how data can be used for pattern mining, analysing user behaviours, and visualizing and tracking data, among others. In this paper, we present a revision of the new methodologies that is designed to allow for efficient data mining and information fusion from social media and of the new applications and frameworks that are currently appearing under the "umbrella" of the social networks, social media and big data paradigms.
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paper_title: De-anonymizing Social Networks

paper_content:

Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc.We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized social-network graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12% error rate.Our de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network topology, does not require creation of a large number of dummy "sybil" nodes, is robust to noise and all existing defenses, and works even when the overlap between the target network and the adversary's auxiliary information is small.
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paper_title: Similar but Different: Exploiting Users' Congruity for Recommendation Systems

paper_content:

The pervasive use of social media provides massive data about individuals’ online social activities and their social relations. The building block of most existing recommendation systems is the similarity between users with social relations, i.e., friends. While friendship ensures some homophily, the similarity of a user with her friends can vary as the number of friends increases. Research from sociology suggests that friends are more similar than strangers, but friends can have different interests. Exogenous information such as comments and ratings may help discern different degrees of agreement (i.e., congruity) among similar users. In this paper, we investigate if users’ congruity can be incorporated into recommendation systems to improve it’s performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of embedding congruity related information into recommendation systems.
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paper_title: Towards identity anonymization on graphs

paper_content:

The proliferation of network data in various application domains has raised privacy concerns for the individuals involved. Recent studies show that simply removing the identities of the nodes before publishing the graph/social network data does not guarantee privacy. The structure of the graph itself, and in its basic form the degree of the nodes, can be revealing the identities of individuals. To address this issue, we study a specific graph-anonymization problem. We call a graph k-degree anonymous if for every node v, there exist at least k-1 other nodes in the graph with the same degree as v. This definition of anonymity prevents the re-identification of individuals by adversaries with a priori knowledge of the degree of certain nodes. We formally define the graph-anonymization problem that, given a graph G, asks for the k-degree anonymous graph that stems from G with the minimum number of graph-modification operations. We devise simple and efficient algorithms for solving this problem. Our algorithms are based on principles related to the realizability of degree sequences. We apply our methods to a large spectrum of synthetic and real datasets and demonstrate their efficiency and practical utility.
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paper_title: Big data and hydroinformatics

paper_content:

Big data is popular in the areas of computer science, commerce and bioinformatics, but is in an early stage in hydroinformatics. Big data is originated from the extremely large datasets that cannot be processed in tolerable elapsed time with the traditional data processing methods. Using the analogy from the object-oriented programming, big data should be considered as objects encompassing the data, its characteristics and the processing methods. Hydroinformatics can benefit from the big data technology with newly emerged data, techniques and analytical tools to handle large datasets, from which creative ideas and new values could be mined. This paper provides a timely review on big data with its relevance to hydroinformatics. A further exploration on precipitation big data is discussed because estimation of precipitation is an important part of hydrology for managing floods and droughts, and understanding the global water cycle. It is promising that fusion of precipitation data from remote sensing, weather radar, rain gauge and numerical weather modelling could be achieved by parallel computing and distributed data storage, which will trigger a leap in precipitation estimation as the available data from multiple sources could be fused to generate a better product than those from single sources.
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paper_title: Service-Oriented Architecture: Analysis and Design for Services and Microservices

paper_content:

The Top-Selling, De Facto Guide to SOA--Now Updated with New Content and Coverage of Microservices! For more than a decade, Thomas Erls best-selling Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design has been the definitive end-to-end tutorial on SOA, service-orientation, and service technologies. Now, Erl has thoroughly updated the industrys de facto guide to SOA to reflect new practices, technologies, and strategies that have emerged through hard-won experience and creative innovation. This Second Edition officially introduces microservices and micro task abstraction as part of service-oriented architecture and its associated service layers. Updated case study examples and illustrations further explain and position the microservice model alongside and in relation to more traditional types of services. Coverage includes: Easy-to-understand, plain English explanations of SOA and service-orientation fundamentals (as compiled from series titles) Microservices, micro task abstraction, and containerization Service delivery lifecycle and associated phases Analysis and conceptualization of services and microservices Service API design with REST services, web services, and microservices Modern service API and contract versioning techniques for web services and REST services Up-to-date appendices with service-orientation principles, REST constraints, and SOA patterns (including three new patterns) Service-Oriented Architecture: Analysis and Design for Services and Microservices, Second Edition, will be indispensable to application architects, enterprise architects, software developers, and any IT professionals interested in learning about or responsible for designing or implementing modern-day, service-oriented solutions.
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paper_title: Cloud Computing: Implementation, Management, and Security

paper_content:

Cloud Computing: Implementation, Management, and Security provides an understanding of what cloud computing really means, explores how disruptive it may become in the future, and examines its advantages and disadvantages. It gives business executives the knowledge necessary to make informed, educated decisions regarding cloud initiatives. The authors first discuss the evolution of computing from a historical perspective, focusing primarily on advances that led to the development of cloud computing. They then survey some of the critical components that are necessary to make the cloud computing paradigm feasible. They also present various standards based on the use and implementation issues surrounding cloud computing and describe the infrastructure management that is maintained by cloud computing service providers. After addressing significant legal and philosophical issues, the book concludes with a hard look at successful cloud computing vendors. Helping to overcome the lack of understanding currently preventing even faster adoption of cloud computing, this book arms readers with guidance essential to make smart, strategic decisions on cloud initiatives.
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Title: Applications of Social Media in Hydroinformatics: A Survey

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: This section should provide an overview of the evolution of remote sensing technology and its impact on Earth Environmental Observation (EO).

Section 2: Literature Background
Description 2: This section should detail the basic concepts of social media and its mining tasks, the main application areas of social media, and the current status of Hydroinformatics.

Section 3: Social Media
Description 3: This section should describe the conceptual and technical foundations of social media, types of social media platforms, and social media's growth and significance.

Section 4: Social Media Mining
Description 4: This section should discuss the data characteristics of social media, the interdisciplinary nature of social media mining, and various research issues in mining social media.

Section 5: Social Media Based Applications
Description 5: This section should explore the various domains where social media data mining techniques have been applied to improve decision making and problem solving.

Section 6: Status of Hydroinformatics
Description 6: This section should explain the field of hydroinformatics, its primary lines of focus, and the challenges it faces in integrating ICTs with hydrologic and environmental sciences.

Section 7: Model and Methodology
Description 7: This section should introduce a 4W (What, Why, When, hoW) model and methodological structure proposed for the application of social media in hydroinformatics. 

Section 8: Social Media Applications in Water Quantity Issues
Description 8: This section should discuss the applications of social media in managing water resources, flood monitoring and management, and addressing drought and water scarcity issues. 

Section 9: Social Media Applications in Water Quality Issues
Description 9: This section should cover the role of social media in water quality monitoring, protecting water resources, and responding to water contamination crises.

Section 10: Research Trend and Open Problems
Description 10: This section should identify ongoing research trends, challenges, and open problems in the intersection of social media mining and hydroinformatics.

Section 11: Conclusion
Description 11: This section should summarize the potential and challenges of applying social media and big data in hydroinformatics, emphasizing the necessity of adopting cutting-edge technologies and formulating industry standards.