Retrieve volunteered geographic information for forest fire

The proposed contribution describes a methodology we are testing in the framework of an exploratory research project on the contribution of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in the case-study of forest fires. The purpose of the research is to assess the value of VGI at different stages of a fire event. The first step of the methodology focuses on the retrieval of geographical information related to forest fire from social networks. VGI is intrinsically heterogeneous as it is provided by different people, using different media such as photographs, text, and video. Moreover, geographical information can be explicit and expressed as coordinates or implicit as expressed in the text as location names. In this stage of the project we are extracting text data from Twitter and photographs from Flickr.