Distributed collaborative situation-map making for disaster response

Journal article (2011)
Department
Mediamatics (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: ©2011 Gunawan, L.T., AL-Ers, H.E.B., Brinkman, W.P., Neerincx, M.A.
Distributed Collaboration, sensemaking, situation mapping, disaster response, map sharing, situation awareness,
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

31-12-2011

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Source:

Interacting with Computers 23(4)2011, 308-316 Preliminary version

ISSN:

0953-5438

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Mediamatics

Abstract

A situation map that shows the overview of a disaster situation serves as a valuable tool for disaster response teams. It helps them to orientate their location and to make disaster response decisions. It is, however, a complicated task to rapidly generate a complete and comprehensive situation map of a disaster area, particularly due to the centralized organization of disaster management and the limited emergency services. In this study, we propose to let the affected population be utilised as an additional resource that can actively help to make such a situation map. The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility of constructing a shared situation map using a collaborative distributed mechanism. By examining earlier research, a detailed list of potential problems is identified in the collaborative map-making process. These problems were then addressed in an experiment which evaluated a number of proposed solutions. The results showed that more collaboration channels led to a situation map of better quality, and that including confidence information for objects and events in the map helped the discussion process during the map-making.

Files

279400.pdf
(pdf | 0.25 Mb)