Crowd-sourcing tools within the PREPARE analytical platform

A brief overview of the crowd-sourcing tools developed within the analytical platform of the PREPARE project is presented. Crowd sourcing relates to methods that: offer a Web Content Discovery Service that automatically acquires and analyses content from social networks and the Web to extract information during nuclear or radiological (NR) events as well as the public opinion and perspective regarding an event occurrence and development; support an Ask the Expert Service for the public to have access to information relevant to NR events. Crowd sourcing provides the means to enhance the relevance and quality of publicly available information that is to be distributed through the analytical platform. To that end, processes have been formulated to collect: Web content relevant to a NR event and analyse it for trend identification regarding public opinions and concerns expressed in Web forums. Large-scale content acquisition and text analytics for Web-forum monitoring within social networks provides results at a scale that cannot be manually achieved; feedback from the user interaction with the system and analyse it to identify documents of interest and relevance to the queries posed.