EDIT – Extracting Disaster Information from Text – or – Editing Disaster scenarios with Information extracted from Text – is a methodology to threat textual information extracted from web, originated by non-expert users and referring to the occurrence of a disaster event.

The project is born from a collaboration between CIMA Foundation (Italy) and the Nottingham Geospatial Institute (NGI) (United Kingdom).

The main goal is the development of a multi-perspective scenario of damage or potential risk using information from non-authoritative data ( i.e. online news, social media, photos, videos) collected during a disaster. The project represents a new contribute to the vision of scenarios and it is focused on the possibility of mosaicking real-time information from heterogeneous sources and a new approach to emergency response applications, integrating a semantic reasoning into an event-based database system with usage of formal domain definitions.  EDIT is structured in many components and uses an operational tool based on Java for analyzing texts through Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, semantics and ontologies.

The innovative contribution of the project are:

-the realization of a disaster ontology,

-the conceptualization of a disaster event into a concept map,

-the geographic accuracy analysis which allow to geographically aggregate the information,

-the integration of semantic and rule-based reasoning,

-the creation of a spatial database to handle and select the most relevant event-related information,

-the application of a filter of  semantic reliability and geographic location accuracy on data,

-the representation of these information into scenarios,

-the use of open source software.