Collecting information in a professional way leads to a better assessment of situations, especially in crisis management. Monitoring the media, text mining in internet news and automated analysis of developing risks are valuable assests to crisis prevention, whereas damage assessment in many cases can be based on open source information in the reactive phase of crisis management. Of course, these activities are to be executed by automated algorithms and not by human intervention any more, and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) has developed a powerful suite of applications in open source information mining that contribute since years to the crisis management processes in the European Union.
Key capability to do this job is the development of automated algorithms for text mining and analysis, sometimes even going as far as working on sentiment detection. To understand how difficult the task can be, one must take into account that there are 22 different official languages in the 27 European Member States. Additionally, for international dimension, especially arabic plays an important role.
The JRC has successfully managed to complement its capabilities in automated text mining and analysis with the interpretation of commercially available satellite images and therefore can provide an integrated toolset for intelligent situation assessment in civil security. Examples comprise the Medisys application that automatically monitors disease spread news on the internet and models spread forecasts; the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System GDACS with more than 10.000 subscribers from the first responder community and the general EMM suite for European Media Monitoring to detect developing stories. Future challenges are in the use of non-textual information (e.g. streaming video) or in the analysis of social network entries for situation assessment ("community remote sensing").
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