Traditional media have a long history in covering natural disasters and crises. In many instances, these media remain major providers of information about an event. In recent years, however, information about natural disasters has increasingly been disseminated on a significant scale via Social Media platforms. These media provide new, additional and complementary angles on events and, combined with traditional media, produce a more complete spectrum of coverage. We present an approach, combining information from across the different kinds of media—traditional as well as social—and also across multiple languages, providing opportunities for first responders and decision makers to gain improved situational awareness and allowing for improved disaster relief, support, mitigation and resilience measures. The approach is put into context by relating it to a long-term strategic model including horizon-scanning and risk-management activities and a 5-phase disaster model forming the basis for information gathering and dissemination activities. To illustrate the research efforts the QuOIMA (Quelloffene Integrierte Multimedia Analyse) project, based on the pillars of cross-media, multimedia, and multilingual processing and representing major aspects of the general framework is presented. QuOIMA focuses on the information gathering aspects from the point of view of a first responder and crisis manager or -communicator rather than the management of active (outgoing) communication. Initial findings on data collected during the 2013 Central European floods are reported and discussed.

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