GeoCollaborative crisis management: designing technologies to meet real-world needs

ABSTRACT

Preventing, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from natural and human-induced disasters all require access to geographically referenced information and tools for making available information relevant to the tasks at hand. Goals of the research summarized here are to advance our scientific understanding of how groups (or groups of groups) work with geospatial information and technologies in crisis management and to use that understanding to guide development of tools that are intuitive for non-specialist users and that enable coordination within and across crisis management teams. This overview highlights progress on: understanding work in crisis management, enabling distributed information access through context-mediated geo-semantic interoperability, extension of natural, multimodal interface methods to mobile devices, development of a collaborative map-based web portal to support international humanitarian relief logistics, and technology transition into real-world practice. We also introduce our new DHS-supported Regional Visualization & Analytics Center, which builds directly upon our GCCM work.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alan M. MacEachren , Sven Fuhrmann , Michael McNeese , Guoray Cai , Rajeev Sharma, Project highlight: GeoCollaborative crisis management, Proceedings of the 2005 national conference on Digital government research, May 15-18, 2005, Atlanta, Georgia
• 2: M. D. McNeese, "Pursuing medical human factors in an information age: the promise of a living lab approach," presented at Proceedings of Human Factors in Medicine, 2002.
• 3: I. Terrell, M. D. McNeese, H. Huang, S. Fuhrmann, and A. MacEachren, "The Use of Mobile Devices by West Nile Virus Field Workers," presented at Human Computer Interaction International, Las Vegas, NV, 2005.
• 4: R. E. T. Jones, M. D. McNeese, E. S. Connors, J. Tyrone Jefferson, and D. Hall, "A Distributed Cognition Simulation involving Homeland Security and Defense: The Development of NeoCITIES," presented at Human Factors and Ergonomics Society's 48th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2004.
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• 6: Guoray Cai , Yinkun Xue, Activity-oriented context-aware adaptation assisting mobile geo-spatial activities, Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 29-February 01, 2006, Sydney, Australia [doi>10.1145/1111449.1111535]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.8 Database applications
          Subjects: Spatial databases and GIS

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.7 Database Administration

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.1 Project and People Management
          Subjects: Systems analysis and design

General Terms:
Design, Management

Keywords:
GIS, GeoCollaboration, crisis management, human-centered design, knowledge elicitation, multimodal interfaces