Abstract: The effectiveness of emergency response largely depends on having a precise, up-to-date situational picture. With the World Wide Web having evolved from a small read-only text collection to a large-scale collection of socially created data accessible both to machines and humans alike, with the advent of social media and ubiquitous mobile applications, new sources of information are available. Currently, that potentially valuable information remains mostly unused by the command staff, mainly because the sheer amount of information cannot be handled efficiently. In this paper, we show an approach for turning massive amounts of unstructured citizen-generated content into relevant information supporting the command staff in making better informed decisions. We leverage Linked Open Data and crowdsourcing for processing data from social media, and we show how the combination of human intelligence in the crowd and automatic approaches for enhancing the situational picture with Linked Open Data will lead to a Web 3.0 approach for more efficient information handling in crisis management. © 2012 ISCRAM.