UrbangEnCy: An emergency events dataset based on citizen sensors for monitoring urban scenarios in Ecuador

Data Brief. 2020 Dec 24:34:106693. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2020.106693. eCollection 2021 Feb.

Abstract

Recently, the use of the citizen-sensors (people generating and sharing real data by social media) for detecting and disseminating emergency events in real-time have shown a considerable increase because people at the place of the event, as well as elsewhere, can quickly post relevant information on this type of alerts. Here, we present an emergency events dataset called UrbangEnCy. The dataset contains over 25500 texts in Spanish posted on Twitter from January 19th to August 19th, 2020, with emergencies and non-emergencies related content in Ecuador. We obtained, cleaned and, filtered these tweets and, then we selected the location and temporal data as well as tweet content. Besides, the data set includes annotations regarding the type of tweet (emergency / non-emergency) as well as additional nomenclature used to describe emergencies in the Center for immediate response service to emergencies (ECU 911) of Ecuador and international emergency services agencies (ESAs). UrbangEnCy dataset facilitates evaluating data science performance, machine learning, and natural language processing algorithms used with supervised and unsupervised problems re- related to text mining and pattern recognition. The dataset is freely and publicly available at https://doi.org/10.17632/4x37zz82k8.

Keywords: Citizen sensors; ECU 911; Ecuador; Emergency events; Social media; Text mining.