An Interactive, Location-Aware Taiwanese Social Network for Both Everyday Use and Disaster Management

The concept of leveraging social network crowdsourcing to help governments respond to and manage disaster events has become popular in recent years. However, existing methods in Taiwan have been challenged by the following difficulties. (1) Information crowdsourced from existing social networks has typically been limited by privacy settings (which can prevent data collection) and formatting issues (which can affect data processing). (2) Existing social networks lack location-aware functions, which makes it difficult to do the spatial analyses of disaster events. (3) Platforms which have been created to collect disaster information do not typically attract enough users to facilitate effective crowdsourcing of information following an disaster. To address these limitations, this study proposes a novel, interactive, and location-aware Taiwanese social network. Unlike social networks which are currently popular, our proposed network focuses on geographic space, and users can only view posts which were generated near their current location or close to where they live. Under normal, non-disaster circumstances, users can employ our proposed social network to view issues in their surrounding environment. In the event of an disaster, users can employ our social network to provide disaster management agencies with comprehensive information about the disaster. In addition, disaster management agencies can use the proposed social network to interact with users who are located near the disaster. We anticipate that our proposed social network will better facilitate information crowdsourcing than convention social networks in Taiwan.