An information filtering method for emergency management

Information filtering is a function to select useful or interesting information for the user among a large amount of information. This function has become very important as network technology develops rapidly. This paper focuses on information filtering for emergency management. When a large‐scale disaster happens, the problem of information flood can be very serious because a great deal of information occurs in a short time and is sent to a person or an organization that is responsible for managing the situation. In this paper, we first consider features of information in emergency situations, and propose an information filtering system for emergency management. The proposed system is composed of three parts: message structuring part, causal analysis part, and information classification part. A prototype system is developed and its effectiveness is evaluated by experiments. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 147(1): 60–69, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.10233