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In the aftermath of disastrous events in Japan, safety information and rescue requests, as well as emergency alerts and damage situations, have been shared on Twitter. However, even victims who are familiar with smartphones or similar devices and social media cannot easily share detailed information, such as the coordinates or address of their current location, which are essential components of safety information and rescue requests. Moreover, local governments and rescue experts have difficulty in gathering such tweets from Twitter. In this paper, we propose a novel system to enable the victims to share their safety information, make rescue requests, and enable quick information gathering for decision making by local government staff or rescue experts. The proposed system is a Twitter-based safety confirmation system named T-@npi. Using the proposed application, the users can easily submit their safety information and send rescue requests on Twitter. The users who want to confirm the safety information can check it quickly on Twitter or via this system. Furthermore, the registered safety information is displayed on an online map to support rescue and assistance activities by local governments and rescue experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural disasters are events that humans cannot control, and Japan has suffered from many such disasters over its long history. Many of these have caused severe damage to human lives and property. These days, numerous Japanese people have gained considerable experience preparing for disasters and are now striving to predict the effects of disasters using social network services (SNSs) to exchange information in real time. Currently, Twitter is the most popular and powerful SNS tool used for disaster response in Japan because it allows users to exchange and disseminate information quickly. However, since almost all of the Japanese-related content is also written in the Japanese language, which restricts most of its benefits to Japanese people, we feel that it is necessary to create a disaster response system that would help people who do not understand Japanese. Accordingly, this paper presents the framework of a question-answering (QA) system that was developed using a Twitter dataset containing more than nine million tweets compiled during the Osaka North Earthquake that occurred on 18 June 2018. We also studied the structure of the questions posed and developed methods for classifying them into particular categories in order to find answers from the dataset using an ontology, word similarity, keyword frequency, and natural language processing. The experimental results presented herein confirm the accuracy of the answer results generated from our proposed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self- and mutual-help by citizens are important as well as social-help from the local governments, for disaster prevention and mitigation. Then, town watching and disaster prevention map-making workshops are held to review the town and promote self- and mutual-help by citizens. On the other hand, the use of social media for information sharing during and after disasters has been gaining attention. To facilitate information sharing in disasters, we developed a web system, Disaster Information Tweeting and Mapping System (DITS/DIMS). From the above background, we organized a town-watching workshop using DITS/DIMS in October 2018 in Minami Ward, Sapporo City, Hokkaido, Japan; affected area of the Hokkaido Eastern Iburi Earthquake in September 2018. In this paper, we explain the workshop procedure, outcome, questionnaire survey results, and post-meeting. The questionnaire survey result shows that the workshop educated the participants about posting useful information on social media during a disaster. In addition, at the post-meeting, the participants recognized that they had reviewed the town only from the perspective of "daily life" convenience before the earthquake, and they had not evaluated the "emergency viewpoint." Therefore, the workshop was a meaningful opportunity for the participants to review the town in terms of disaster prevention and mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of social media in disaster communication and its potential to foster a sense of communal belonging through shared emotional connection, using the case study of the 3.11 disaster in Japan. The 2011 triple disaster had profound implications for new interactions among individuals, as the earthquake not only brought destruction to the surrounding environment, but also reconfigured many people's sense of place, security and communal belonging. I argue that, in a post-disaster context, social media had substantial implications for individuals'perceptions of belonging to local and regional communities, as it introduced new dimensions and forms of interaction among individuals, regardless of temporal and spatial barriers. Qualitatively approached, this study examines the evolving potential of social media to serve as a space where individuals can experience and express closeness in time of crisis, creating and maintaining new forms of affective communities in digital space. Based on in-depth interviews and social media data from Japan that relates to the 3.11 disaster, this article sheds light on how social media can enable users to experience a sense of belonging to local, regional and global communities through multi-level interaction with similar others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed to describe the utilization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a digital infrastructure concerning disaster countermeasures in Japan. Specifically, the study introduced development cases of the systems integrating social media and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and presented the utilization potential as a digital infrastructure. Additionally, taking up Twitter as a familiar digital infrastructure, the study also presented its utilization potential based on the case of the heavy-rain disaster in Western Japan in 2018. As a result, due to the close relationship between the reality and virtual spaces, the issue is how to make the information circulating in the virtual space efficiently and effectively aid in the rescue and support activities in the reality space. The above systems are effective in order to solve such an issue, because these can efficiently consolidate the essential information on the digital map of Web-GIS. Additionally, it is necessary to set rules for the utilization of social media, and sift through information and share only the necessary information to the affected local governments and those involved in the rescue and support activities. Furthermore, various information communication methods including verbal calls in addition to ICT are necessary especially for people who are vulnerable to information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]