DisDSS: a novel Web-based smart disaster management system for determining the nature of a social media message for decision-making using deep learning – case study of COVID-19

Purpose This paper aims to propose DisDSS: a Web-based smart disaster management (DM) system for decision-making that will assist disaster professionals in determining the nature of disaster-related social media (SM) messages. The research classifies the tweets into need-based, availability-based, situational-based, general and irrelevant categories and visualizes them on a web interface, location-wise. Design/methodology/approach It is worth mentioning that a fusion-based deep learning (DL) model is introduced to objectively determine the nature of an SM message. The proposed model uses the convolution neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory network layers. Findings The developed system leads to a better performance in accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, area under receiver operating characteristic curve and area under precision-recall curve, compared to other state-of-the-art methods in the literature. The contribution of this paper is three fold. First, it presents a new covid data set of SM messages with the label of nature of the message. Second, it offers a fusion-based DL model to classify SM data. Third, it presents a Web-based interface to visualize the structured information. Originality/value The architecture of DisDSS is analyzed based on the practical case study, i.e. COVID-19. The proposed DL-based model is embedded into a Web-based interface for decision support. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is India’s first SM-based DM system.