News Extraction from Public Data Feeds for First Responders Fact Sheet

The DHS S&T News Extraction from Public Data Feeds for First Responders project seeks to develop a data-sifting social media ingestion system to help responders gain improved situational awareness without requiring large amounts of human attention.

To do this, the project is designing, building and testing a software suite to interface with a social media platform and extract valuable posts, serving this news up to first responders while allowing them to engage more deeply with specific postings if desired. Twitter has been chosen as the initial service of interest due to its ease of use and relatively wide reach.