EmerGent aims at understanding the positive and the negative impact of social media in emergencies in order to enhance objective and perceived safety and security of citizens before, during and after emergencies. Furthermore, EmerGent aims at strengthening the role of European companies dealing with services and products related to the aimed research and development results. EmerGent will perform studies on the communication behaviour via social media in an emergency situation and its impact on emergency management procedures with citizens and public authorities (emergency management services) involved. The understanding of critical situations, the reactions expressed through social media and the general importance and preferred types of social media will be considered. For this research new methods and tools will be developed to reinforce the communication between weakly connected (via social media) crisis-communities (citizens) and the emergency management services, supported by European associations. To handle the vast amount of valuable and distributed data new methods for Information Mining and Information Quality will be developed to classify and rate publicly available and provided data from users. With developed methodologies and software tools for the routing of mined and classified emergency relevant information from social networks, EmerGent will create a comprehensive concept for Novel Emergency Management. All analysis and impact assessment results will lead to the creation of guidelines. Hence stakeholders will be enabled to understand and get the most benefit out of social media and its integration into their processes.