A humanitarian crisis (or humanitarian disaster) is defined as a singular event or a series of events that are threatening in terms of the health, safety or well-being of a community or a large group of people. Humanitarian crises may include armed conflicts, epidemics, famine, natural disasters, man-made emergencies, or any of various combinations thereof. These crises may involve or lead to a humanitarian disaster that extends beyond the mandate or capacity of any single agency. Regardless of the type of disaster, survivors are left in urgent of need of life-saving assistance such as shelter, food, water and health care.
One broad objective in any humanitarian response, regardless of the type of disaster, is to save lives and reduce suffering through meeting humanitarian needs. How such needs are met depends on the specific emergency. For example, in armed conflicts more effort is taken to protect the lives of humanitarian workers. In floods and tsunamis, access to affected populations might sometimes be challenging. Each humanitarian disaster raises a unique set of challenges, thereby mandating a customized response. Phenomena such as unplanned urbanization, under-development, poverty and climate change are all factors that can make humanitarian emergencies more complex, frequent and/or severe.
During many recent humanitarian crises, observers have reached for their smart phones, tablets, or other portable electronic devices to report, provide commentary, and explore information surrounding the crisis. Data gathered by these applications constitutes a large repository of real-time, crisis-related information. However, using this data to analyze a humanitarian crisis is extremely difficult, due in part to the unstructured, informal, and personalized nature of the gathered data. Thus, there exists a need to overcome at least one of the preceding deficiencies and limitations of the related art.