Frequently asked questions
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What is FloodTags?
FloodTags is a real-time media monitoring platform that tracks and analyzes social media and news reports to detect and visualize weather impact events worldwide. Our technology helps governments, researchers, and humanitarian organizations make data-driven decisions.
How can FloodTags help me?
FloodTags provides real-time data insights for disaster response, operational management, insurance, and climate impact analysis. It enables situational awareness, post-event verification, emergency response coordination, insurance policy design, and long-term climate trend analysis. By leveraging social media and other data sources, FloodTags helps organizations make informed, data-driven decisions.
What media data do you have available?
We monitor X, BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp plus more than 150,000 news sources, blogs and forums around the world. From these sources, we take in all data that might possibly be relevant, both from official as well as non-official channels. We do our data collection thoroughly, as our customers in weather impact monitoring are much averse of false negatives (that something is going on, while they don’t know about it).
How often is the data updated?
Our system collects and processes data in real-time, providing up-to-date insights as new information becomes available. The amount of time between a public post on the media, and display in FloodTags, is less than a minute.
Do you have a notification system?
Yes we do. We detect events on the basis of volume anomalies and text analysis. We send out alerts to users (optional) with a direct link to the relevant data.
Which languages do you monitor?
We are currently monitoring in fourteen languages: English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Indonesian, Malay, Japanese, Polish, Filipino, Dutch, Persian, Portuguese and Slovenian. Together these languages cover est. 99% of the large weather impact events globally. And most of the smaller ones.
Does FloodTags work worldwide?
Yes, FloodTags operates globally, collecting and analyzing event-related data from multiple countries and languages. Some regions may have more data available than others, depending on reporting sources. For instance, UK has much more publicly available media data than Mali. Check with us to get an idea how much the media coverage is in your region.
Do you have any plans to include TikTok in the suite of platforms FloodTags interrogates?
TikTok has a public API and in principle this seems possible. But we haven’t seen so much useful content there yet, for weather impact events. So, we haven’t given this priority. If TikTok is high on your priority list, we can see if we can connect you anyway.
Do you also monitor WhatsApp?
Yes we do. Disaster managers around the world use WhatsApp groups. Keeping track of all messages in all groups and structure it, can be an impossible task.
With FloodTags you can monitor such groups in an automated way. The procedure is that you ask all participants whether they agree with automated monitoring. And then you add a dedicated number to the group. Now, all messages appear in your Dashboard. The information is only visible for your organization. It is NOT shared with any other users of FloodTags.
Finally, you can also do crowd-sourcing with WhatsApp. You can invite the public to send messages to a dedicated number on WhatsApp, and we add them separately to your Dashboard.
Do you have an API?
Yes. FloodTags provides API access for organizations that want to integrate flood data into their own platforms. FloodTags connects to Delft-FEWS (a flood early warning system that is operational in >40 countries) and can also be connected with other water information systems such as Lizard, MIKE and Tygron. More information about the API can be found here.
Do you also do crowd-sourcing?
We support crowd-sourcing via WhatsApp and X. As an organization, you can invite the public to send messages to a dedicated number on WhatsApp, or using a specific hashtag on X, and we add them separately to your Dashboard.
What about privacy regulations and the GDPR?
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is our global standard for privacy compliance. As the most comprehensive and stringent privacy regulation worldwide, it ensures that personal data processed through the FloodTags platform is handled with the highest level of protection. By adhering to GDPR, we apply the strictest data security and privacy safeguards, regardless of where our services are used.
The two types of personal data processed through our platform are:
- Personal data of social media users in content that is displayed or made accessible on the platform. For example: social media user account names, comments, moving and still images in feeds from social media platform X or YouTube as well as personal data of natural persons that are included in the social media content.
- Personal data of the platform’s users. For example: names, User-ID, email addresses, personal data in messages users share with other users on the platform.
More about this in the separate FAQ especially for data privacy and the GDPR.
How long has FloodTags operated as a commercial service, with customers?
FloodTags has been delivering its SAAS to professional clients since 2017. Our first user was the Philippine Red Cross in Manilla. We have a supportive reference letter from them. We now deliver to meteorological offices, disaster management agencies, satellite operators and insurers around the world.
Is FloodTags open source?
No, FloodTags is a commercially operated SaaS platform. We provide a proprietary solution to ensure reliability, scalability, and ongoing innovation. By operating this way, we can keep costs per client low, while continuously improving our services.
Is FloodTags open data?
No, FloodTags is not open data because we do not own the data. The information we analyze comes from publicly available sources, which retain their original ownership. Our role is to process and structure this data into actionable insights, ensuring responsible use and compliance with applicable regulations.
Can government bodies subscribe to the SaaS, even though the code is proprietary and the data is not open data?
Yes, government bodies can subscribe to our proprietary SaaS, and they do. The fact that our code is proprietary does not affect the ability of public sector organizations to use our services. Many governments and international agencies work with commercially operated SaaS providers, as long as the solution meets their security, compliance, and procurement requirements.
Since governments are subject to a high level of scrutiny, we understand the need of thorough due diligence. We are happy to discuss any specific regulations or security concerns that government bodies have and provide the necessary documentation to ensure full compliance.
Do you collaborate with universities and knowledge institutes
We engage in several long-term strategic partnerships to enhance our technology and expertise:
- Deltares is the world’s leading knowledge institute on flood management. We collaborate to enhance the use of online media data in model validation, real-time monitoring and two-way communication via direct messaging. FloodTags is also connected to the Delft-FEWS platform, a flood early warning system that is operational in >40 countries.
- InDeep is a four-year NWO-research of nine universities and companies, on explainable AI. Eight PhDs work on advancing information extraction techniques. Within the consortium, Radboud University and FloodTags do research on interpretable AI for flood detection. The results will gradually be integrated into FloodTags.
- With the British Geological Survey (BGS), a leading geoscience research institution, we are expanding real-time hazard monitoring beyond floods to include geological hazards such as landslides, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. This collaboration operates under the name HazTags.
I heard that the use of real time social media information would in effect be a data scraping activity. Is this correct? How do you collect your data?
This is not correct. Scraping is usually not allowed and that is why APIs exist. At FloodTags, all of the data comes from APIs for which we have the appropriate licenses and comply to the terms of use. The allowed interaction for our users is described in our Terms of Service (in conformity with the licenses of the source APIs).
I’m presuming the social media platform companies own all the social media content to be used, rather than the actual creators. Is this correct?
This is not correct. On social media platforms, the ownership always stays with the creator (in any case for X, BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube). But creators give the platforms a license to use it and distribute it.
Which country is the data collection and storage happening? What legal jurisdiction and copyright laws will apply?
The data is collected and stored on Amazon servers in Ireland. Our operations are primarily governed by Dutch law. However, in specific contracts, we may agree to the application of other jurisdictions, such as the UK or Ireland.
How do you pinpoint data to a longitude latitude?
We identify locations based on the text and determine the general area of the observation. Then, using Google Street View, we manually refine the location to an exact latitude and longitude. The reason we do this manually is that at present, there is no software that can pinpoint locations from photo’s with an acceptable confidence. This may change in future.
Is any form of generative AI being used?
No. We do not use generative AI.
What is the revenue model of FloodTags?
The FloodTags platform is a hosted software solution that can be connected to via an API or front-end dashboard. Our revenue model comprises of Subscriptions for the hosting and maintenance of (parts of) the platform. Clients can request a quotation with us to add new features (that are not already on the backlog).
How do you deal with the constant changes in the social media landscape?
There have been many changes in the landscape in recent years! X is stirring up the social media landscape. New platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon are emerging. While the platforms may change, one thing remains constant: People want to share their observations of a disaster happening and they will find a platform for it.
Our job: Capture those observations. We are now monitoring X, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and we just added BlueSky. And if new platforms become popular, we add them too. We do everything to make sure that such critical information is accessible to responders and decision-makers.
How do you deal with misinformation and fake news?
For serious events there are usually many independent sources. A flood can be covered by 100 or 10.000 photos from different angles, which helps to confirm what’s real. But we can’t guarantee there will never be fake news. What we do to cope with it: We provide the data with a confidence score on the basis of a number of characteristics such as the structure of posts, the number of independent observations of an event, and whether images have been previously used. This provides an indication of reliability of detected events. As the next step, we urge users to look critical to the individual posts that are served and manually validate them before making impactful decisions.
As a final remark: It’s good to realize that fake news is there. FloodTags cannot solve it completely and in the end, every end user will need to consider: 1. Am I using this data, although a few posts could potentially contain fake news? Or 2. will I not use the data, while much of it will be true (and I need to act).
How are you different from other monitoring software?
Most monitoring software focus on monitoring brand reputation, consumer sentiments, emerging trends etc. In some cases, there’s incident monitoring involved, but not for weather impact events.
FloodTags specializes in weather-impact monitoring and analysis with:
- Domain-specific classifiers and information extraction
- Real-time event detection
- Accurate georeferencing (97% confidence)
- Historical event data and time-series
- Integrations with weather impact software, including Delft-FEWS
Can we get data for free, to do research?
Only in long-term strategic partnerships. Over the years, we’ve contributed to many research projects by sharing data. While this has been valuable in some cases, we’ve learned that it often requires significant time and effort without adequate compensation or clear benefits.
Going forward, we focus on sharing data as part of longer-term collaborations where the added value for FloodTags is clear—typically in the form of co-developed tools or code. This approach ensures that our partnerships are mutually beneficial and support both research and innovation.
If you have such a research and have clear financial or code benefits to us, please contact us!