Title: Architecture for gathering and integrating collaborative information for decision support in emergency situations

Authors: Tiago Marino; Maria Luiza Machado De Campos; Marcos R.S. Borges; John G. Breslin; Maciej Dabrowski

Addresses: Graduate Program in Informatics (PPGI), Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ' Graduate Program in Informatics (PPGI), Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ' Graduate Program in Informatics (PPGI), Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ' Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland ' Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland

Abstract: The involvement of citizens in supporting crisis situations is no longer a new phenomenon. In the past, the lack of data was one of the main barriers faced by public managers in the decision-making process. Today the situation has been reversed, such that the challenge faced is managing an excessive mass of data, which is totally dynamic and originating from different sources such as remote environmental sensors, social networks, response teams in the field. During an emergency response, the concern is no longer being able to collect data for a better understanding of the affected environment, but in knowing how to organise, aggregate and separate what is actually useful for crisis managers. This research proposes a collaborative information architecture that considers aspects from environmental complexity in the context of emergency scenarios, in order to support response teams with decision making, through gathering and integrating information that has originated from different media resources and, hence, enriching a decision team's 'current contextual knowledge' base.

Keywords: emergency; heterogeneous information sources; complex systems; information integration; crisis and disaster management; social media; collaboration; domain vocabulary; decision support; data integration.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2018.090420

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2018 Vol.12 No.3/4, pp.345 - 363

Received: 18 Oct 2014
Accepted: 11 May 2015
Published online: 19 Mar 2018 *

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