Digital Typhoon: Notice: Emergency Release of 'Typhoon Imagination,' 'Typhoon Crowds' and 'Social Typhoon'

Emregency Release of 'Typhoon Imagination,' 'Typhoon Crowds' and 'Social Typhoon'

Considering the approach of Typhoon DIANMU to Japan, we decided to urgently release the following three sites today.

In the following, we will describe the importance of three Websites that we released today, and introduce Typhoon Front that we improved at the same time.

Importance of 'Typhoon Imagination' and 'Typhoon Crowds'

This release is regarded as a big leap in the history of Digital Typhoon project because this is the first time in the project to step into the following areas.

• Future information Digital typhoon has been dealing with archiving information of the past and the present, but information of the future has been intentionally excluded. This time, however, Typhoon Imagination deals with future information for the first time.
• Community Digital typhoon has never started a service to make a community by asking users to make registration. Of course, Typhoon Front and Twiphoon are a kind of very loose community-based services that did not require user registration. Typhoon Crowds deals with user registration for the first time, and we use it as a starting point for advanced services.

Keywords such as "future information" and "community" are now included in Digital Typhoon, and it allows us to augment typhoon information in more diverse aspects.

Apology for the Emergency Release

Because this is an emergency release, some functions are still not available, however.

The most important limitation is that we are still in preparation for user registration to become a member of the community. Due to this problem, the following functions are not yet available.

We decided to release the Websites today, however, under the situation that very important functions are not yet ready because 'Typhoon Imagination' has other useful functions that don't require login, and the idea of the "imagine" function of 'Typhoon Imagination' can be seen from the tutorial video in Typhoon Imagination | Help (in Japanese). We apologize for the inconvenience, but please wait for a while until the release.

Release of 'Social Typhoon'

Participatory services in Digital Typhoon are ever increasing, and we now have more services after the release of 'Typhoon Imagination' and 'Typhoon Crowds.' Users are feeling difficulty in understanding the overall structure of those services.

To solve this problem, we decided to set up a portal to participatory services. This is the purpose of Social Typhoon. This page summarizes the list of participatory services of Digital Typhoon in a tabular from, and offers descriptions about the number of services and relationship between them. We also added a short description for each services to touch the sense of services.

Improvement of 'Typhoon Front'

About Typhoon Front, along with the release of 'Typhoon Crowds,' we started a service so that a login user can write a mini report. A login user can write a message up to 140 characters (*1), which is expected to be an easy way to share the situation of many places.

In addition, integration with Twiphoon has also started in response to many requests. The new version visualizes tweets aggregated at Twiphoon as an animate map with location and time. 'Typhoon Front' now becomes a more useful map interface that integrates four types of information sources.

(*1) Probably you have seen '140 characters' somewhere, but this is decided after the fact that we have 140 Asian typhoon names.