A social Sensor Web architecture: Harvesting human observation information from Weibo

In China, Weibo, a prevailing social media service attracts billions of users who use smart phones to send twits with text, image, and video to record and monitor the event. The social media information could be a certain earth observation data when the information relates to a certain earth observation event. While the method of extracting useful the social media information and applying the information in the earth observing research field has yet to be fully exploited. The current Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) framework is a set of outstanding protocols and standards to describe and serve the all sorts of earth observation data. In this paper, we are trying to present how the Sensor Web framework works with social media information, which is expected to provide useful earth observation information when in an emergency. We put our experiment scenario in the Ya´an earthquake in Sichuan, 2013. Through the framework, we can retrieve the earthquake relief data in the earthquake area, and we use Sensor Planning Service (SPS) and Sensor Observation Service (SOS) to serve the monitoring process to provide the decision makers with real-time earthquake relief information. We think the framework would also be significant in similar emergency response.