On-Demand Information Portals for Disaster Situations (original) (raw)
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The RESCUE disaster portal for disasters and emergency response
2008
This paper describes the Disaster Portal, a multi-faceted information portal for use by citizens and emergency personnel during disasters and emergency response. This portal is the result of a collaboration between the RESCUE project at UC-Irvine and the City of Ontario, California Fire Department (OFD). The portal provides a wide range of real-time information in disaster situations, such as situation summaries, announcements, shelter information, and aggregated services such as family reunification and donation management. A first version of this portal was developed and deployed by the City of Ontario in September 2007. The current system serves as a base to develop and refine results from several areas of research which are being incorporated into the existing system to provide additional or advanced capabilities. We provide an overview of the portal's capabilities, followed by technical details on the system architecture and implementation. We describe the experience of deployment of the system in the recent California wildfires. Finally we describe work in progress on several advanced capabilities.
2017
Information is an essential component for better emergency response. Although a lot of information being available at various places during any kind of emergency, many emergency responders (ERs) use only a limited amount of the available information. The reason for this is that the available information heterogeneously distributed, in different formats, and ERs are unable to get access to the relevant information. Moreover, without having access to the needed information, many emergency responders are not able to obtain a sufficient understanding of the emergency situation. Consequently, a lot of time is being used to search for the needed information and poor decisions may be made. Therefore, in this paper, our research focuses on bringing the available heterogeneously dispersed information together to improve the information accessibility for ERs. In this study, we present an approach for integration of heterogeneous databases in the Semantic Web context using a Model-driven data ...
A Context Driven Information Retrieval for Online Urban Disaster Management System
samuko.free.fr
Most of Disaster Managing Approaches depends firmly on information and communication management system. Due to the advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), a natural disaster, when occurs in an urban place, requires a high reliable quality of online heterogeneous urban information. In this context, decisions require the involvement of many decision makers and must be made in very short laps of time by using most of the available information. Since the information space has been opened the task of getting "online" the "more relevant information" has become real dilemma due to the huge structured and non structured available information whether on the Internet or on the Intranet. In our project a Disaster Decision Support System is based on a groupware approach in which a collaborative information board has to share within the different decision makers. Such system incorporates, at least and in addition to the interactive decision board, an optimised Data Base Management System, a light Geographical Information System, an Electronic Document Management System and a very powerful server. We consider that the information updating (as it is displayed or requested) on and within this decision board can enlighten a lot about the context. Consequently, we have been interested in Context Modelling available approaches. Most of these modelling approaches don't, exceptionally, fit to crises or disaster context. Therefore we built our own model based mainly on the approach of context ontology We have also developed a context capturing approach capable to retrieve the "more appropriate" and "efficient" "contextual" information (or web-document) to urban disaster management system. Every time the context is captured it will be used to generate continuously an orderly sorted set of requests.
Riskr: a web 2.0 platform to monitor and share disaster information
Disaster management that uses web-based technology to enhance user collaboration around disasters is an emergent field. A number of dedicated 'disaster portals' exist but they do not integrate large social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. These social networking sites can facilitate the analysis and sharing of collective intelligence around disaster information on a far greater scale by increasing accessibility to, and the use of, a disaster portal. This paper presents the 'Riskr' project, which applies a low-technological solution to creating a disaster portal fed by social networking messages. The system has been implemented using Twitter and tested by users to determine the feasibility. Results suggest the combination of online services and interoperability between disaster portals; and social networks can further enhance disaster management initiatives as 70.5% of the users were able to estimate the correct location of a disaster (e.g. fallen power lines, fire).
Developing a System for Information Management in Disaster Relief - Methodology and Requirements
ISCRAM, 2010
This paper discusses our ongoing work on a system for collecting, managing and distributing relevant information in disaster relief operations. It describes the background and conditions under which the system is being developed and employed. We present our methodology, the requirements and current functionality of the system and the lessons learned in exercises and training, involving a large number of international disaster management experts. We found that the viability of this kind of tool is determined by three main factors, namely reliability, usability and frugality. The system has gone through many prototype iterations and has matured towards becoming operational in a specific type of mission, i.e. assessment missions for large scale natural and man-made disasters. This paper aims at making a wider audience of disaster management experts aware of that system and the support it may provide to their work. Other researchers and developers may find our experience useful for creating systems in similar domains.
Design of Categorization Mechanism for Disaster-Information-Gathering System
J. Wirel. Mob. Networks Ubiquitous Comput. Dependable Appl., 2012
Organizations that are responsible for disaster and emergency management are faced with the issue of how to gather reliable and useful information during a major disaster. We consider an informationgathering platform for large-scale disasters and emergencies based on mobile terminals. A simple solution to realize an information-gathering system is to construct a server where information is uploaded and published. However, such a centralized approach is not flexible nor is it robust. For example, it is very hard to find an appropriate system to which the user can upload information during a disaster, and the centralized server may be down because of overload or because it has been physically destroyed. We must consider a distributed and dynamic architecture for the system. Security and privacy issues are another concern that should be addressed for providing information from user’s mobile terminals. Here, we focus on the design of a categorization mechanism for the information-gather...
MADIS: A Multimedia-Aided Disaster Information Integration System for Emergency Management
Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing, 2012
With the proliferation of smart devices, disaster responders and community residents are capturing footage, pictures and video of the disaster area with mobile phones and wireless tablets. This multimedia disaster situation information is critical for assisting emergency management (EM) personnel to effectively respond in a timely manner. Currently, however the data is not integrated in incident command systems where situation reports, incidence action plans, etc. are being held. Therefore, we have designed and developed a Multimedia-Aided Disaster information Integration System (MADIS), which utilizes advanced data mining techniques to analyze situation reports and pictures as well as text captured in the field and automatically link the reports directly to relevant multimedia content. Specifically, a dynamic hierarchical image classification approach is proposed to categorize disaster images into different subjects by fusing image and text information. Situation reports are analyzed using advanced document processing techniques and then associated with processed multimedia data. In order to seamlessly incorporate user interactive activities for improving information integration, a user feedback processing scheme is proposed to refine the association between situation reports and images as well as the affinity among images. The system is developed on Apple's mobile operating system (iOS) and runs on iPad tablets, and its usefulness is evaluated by domain experts from the local EM department.
Semantic Technologies for Civil Information Management during Complex Emergencies
Data sharing in support of situational awareness during complex emergencies remains a challenge to effective response and recovery, despite the fact that significant technological advances have enabled robust mobile data collection capabilities that can operate in both connected and disconnected environments. Current solutions rely on disparate knowledge silos that make situational awareness difficult for operations requiring collaboration to facilitate information sharing and to enable performance tracking for optimal resource allocation. In our paper we discuss the benefits of applying mobile enabled semantic technologies for supporting civil information management (CIM) during complex emergencies and analytically investigate the technical challenges encountered in such efforts. Specifically, we will present research related to developing a Civil Information Management Semantic Wiki (CIM Wiki), built on the Semantic MediaWiki platform. This CIM Wiki is a knowledge portal that enables users to collect, organize, tag, search, browse, visualize, and share structured CIM knowledge.
Disaster Prevention and Rescue Information Service Platforms
International Journal of Automation and Smart Technology, 2011
Because of its special hydrology and physiographic environmental conditions, Taiwan experiences a wide range of natural disasters, such as typhoons, floods, slope collapses, debris flows, and earthquakes, resulting in the loss of many lives and properties. Integration of disaster-related information, such as data and models, and the analysis and application of the information are crucial to reduce the damage caused by natural disasters. Therefore, the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction introduced the information service platform technology of the Research Development and Evaluation Commission to integrate the information of related ministerial departments for added value and use. Related technologies have integrated information of disaster prevention and rescues, assisted the government in disaster prevention and rescue, and effectively reduced the time required for information integration. Additionally, the added value of information applications enabled situational analysis and process handling during natural disasters. This study uses responses to typhoons as examples, and describes how the service application platform of disaster prevention and rescue is used to integrate various data in the response processes and employs related systems to provide users real-time information as a reference for subsequent decision-making.
Challenges in information systems for disaster recovery and response
2008
Disaster recovery and response require a timely coordination of the emergency services. IT-technology provides a tremendous potential to increase efficiency and effectiveness in this area by propagating information efficiently to all the right locations. In this paper we sketch requirements and describe challenges for an integrated disaster management communication and information system, addressing in particular networking, configuration, scheduling and data management issues.