In an effort to enable public safety-focused entities to tap social media analytics in emergency response, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s Text Retrieval Conference, or TREC, Incident Streams project intends to gain access to Twitter’s Enterprise-Level application programming interface, or API.

As part of the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program, NIST began TREC Incident Streams project to support research into social media analytics during emergencies and natural disasters. "Increasingly, people expect emergency responders to monitor social media, but in practice, public safety organizations do not have the technology or expertise to do so. The TREC Incident Streams project identifies tweets sent during emergencies and annotates them for priority and according to an emergency response ontology. NIST then invites research teams from anywhere in the world to develop software systems to automatically filter and classify the tweets. NIST develops the infrastructure to measure the effectiveness of those systems, and a forum for sharing research results, which speeds the improvement of the technology. When the technology matures, such systems could drive analytic dashboards or decision-making processes in public safety organizations," says a public notice.