CONFERENCE PROGRAM

6th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management

Boundary Spanning Initiatives and New Perspectives Gothenburg, Sweden 10th – 13th of May

ISCRAM 2009 is organized by University of Gothenburg & the Viktoria Institute in collaboration with FOI, Linköping University and Lindholmen Science Park.

www.iscram.org [email protected]

ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 1

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

6th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management

Boundary Spanning Initiatives and New Perspectives Gothenburg, Sweden 10th – 13th of May

ISCRAM 2009 is organized by University of Gothenburg & the Viktoria Institute in collaboration with FOI, Linköping University and Lindholmen Science Park.

www.iscram.org [email protected] ISBN 978-91-633-4604-0

Conference Locations  

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10th of May ISCRAM2009 Pre-conference Venue

A IT-University University of Gothenburg Forskningsgången 6 Lindholmen

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Odd Fellow, lunch venue Vasagatan 9

2

Börsen (The City Hall) Gustav Adolfs Torg

3

Stenpiren

11th - 13th of May ISCRAM2009 Conference Venue

B School of Business, Economics and Law University of Gothenburg Vasagatan 1 Göteborg

ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 5

Day to Day Schedule SUNDAY 10th

MONDAY 11th

09:00 - 16:00 PhD-Colloquium

08:45 - 09:00 PLENARY: Opening and Welcome

09:00 - 16:00 SIG Workshops

09:00 - 10:00 KEYNOTE: Lars Hedström (Prime Minister’s Office Sweden) Titel: Information needs for Societal Security in the new Threat Environment

09:00 - 16:00 SAHANA Opensource Workshop 14:00 - 16:00 Mobile Information Technology for



Emergency Response

12:00 - 14:00 Tutorial: Utilizing Crisis management



exercises as research instrument

14:00 - 16:00 Workshop:



Social Media for Crisis Response

16:00 - 17:00 Student Poster Session 18:00 - ISCRAM 2009 Beer evening and informal get-to-gether. This event is taking place at Scandic Hotel Rubinen, located on Kungsportsavenyn 24.

10:00 - 10:30 COFFEE BREAK 10:30 - 12:00 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Human-Computer Interaction Session: Information Overload and Inclusivity Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations Session: Approaches to Information Management Track: Open Track Session: Local Communities and Government Collaboration Track: Standardization and Ontologies Session: Architectures

12:00 - 14:00 LUNCH 14:00 - 15:30 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Break-Out Session: Practitioners Workshop Track: Human-Computer Interaction Session: Interactive Map Technologies Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations Session: IT for Crisis Management in Africa Track: Standardization and Ontologies Session: Interoperability

15:30 - 16:00 COFFEE BREAK 16:00 - 17:30 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Human-Computer Interaction Session: HCI Design & Requirements Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations Session: Rapid Information Dissemination Track: Research Methods Session: Analysis, Testing & Evaluation

19:00 - Welcome Reception The reception takes place at “Börsen” (The City Hall) at Gustav Adolfs Torg.

6 - www.iscram.org

TUESDAY 12th

WEDNESDAY 13th

08:45 - 09:00 PLENARY

08:45 - 09:00 PLENARY

09:00 - 10:00 KEYNOTE Prof Martha Grabowski (LeMoyne College) Highly Reliable Crisis and Disaster Systems

09:00 - 10:00 KEYNOTE Katrin Verclas (MobileActive.org) Title: Flood, Famine, and Mobile Phones

10:00 - 10:30 COFFEE BREAK

10:00 - 10:30 COFFEE BREAK

10:30 - 12:00 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Collaboration and Social Networking Session: Decision-Making

10:30 - 12:00 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Collaboration and Social Networking Session: People and Social Media

Track: Human-Computer Interaction Session: Crisis Communication

Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations Session: Modeling of Humanitarian Operation

Track: Open Track Session: Computing Situation Awareness

Track: Open Track Session: Dependability and Vulnerability

Track: Break-out Session: CityLabs / Living Labs approaches and initatives

Track: Break-out Session: ISCRAM-China & China Emergency Response System

12:00 - 14:30 DEMOS AND LUNCH Hands-On Demo Session

12:00 - 14:00 LUNCH

14:30 - 16:00 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Collaboration and Social Networking Session: Designing for Collaboration

14:00 - 15:30 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Collaboration and Social Networking Session: Lightweight Stakeholder Collaboration

Track: Intelligent Systems Session: Knowledge, Training and Smart Environments

Track: Intelligent Systems Session: Simulation and Resource Allocation

Track: Research Methods Session: Ethnography and Field Reports

Track: Open Track Session: Information Processing in Environmental Crisis

Track: Break-out Session: Boundary-Spanning Initiatives for Humanitarian Operations

16:00 - 16:30 COFFEE BREAK

15:30 - 16:15 CONFERENCE CLOSING



Community Awards ISCRAM 2010 – Preview Closing ceremony

16:30 - 17:30 ISCRAM ASSOCIATION



GENERAL ASSEMBLY MEETING

18:00 -

Boat transportation to the Conference Dinner at “Långedrag Värdshus”.



ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 7

ISCRAM2009 Sponsors GOLD SPONSORS FOI – Swedish Defence Research Agency www.foi.se

PDC – Prolog Development Center www.pdc.dk

VR- Swedish Research Council www.vr.se

SILVER SPONSOR THALES www.thalesgroup.com

BRONZE SPONSORS Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management www.bepress.com/jhsem

ACADEMIC SPONSORS Viktoria Institute www.viktoria.se University of Gothenburg www.gu.se

Partners Linköping University www.liu.se Lindholmen Science Park www.lindholmensciencepark.se 8 - www.iscram.org

viktoria institute

- This page is an advert -

Swedish Defence Research Agency A large part of our research is about keeping one step ahead. Our expert research workers are always ready with a solution when it is needed. The Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) is a mainly assignment-funded agency under the Ministry of Defence. The core activities are research, method and technology development in the interests of Swedish defence and security. The organisation employs approximately 1000 personnel of whom about 800 are scientists. FOI gives its customers access to leading-edge expertise in a large number of fields such as security policy studies, defence and security related analyses, the assessment of various types of threat, systems for control and management of crises, protection against and management of hazardous substances, IT security and the potential offered by new sensors. FOI is one of Europe’s leading research institutes. We offer research, development and studies of relevance to defence, civil security and business. We create solutions which build on new knowledge and the results of research at the leading edge of technology, solutions which promote competitiveness and renewal. Threats and risks know no national borders, we therefore operate in a global arena. Our international network is extensive and we have a huge flow of information. Our research and development activities cover everything from technology and the natural sciences to medicine and social science. FOI is financed mainly by income from assignments placed with us by our customers. Our principal customers are the Swedish Armed Forces and the Defence Materiel Administration but we also have many customers from the various authorities, industry and commerce and foreign organisations FOI operates at three locations in Sweden: Umeå, Stockholm and Linköping. If you would like to know more about our organisation and activities – read more at www.foi.se FOI Swedish Defence Research Agency 164 40 Stockholm, Sweden Tel: +46-8-555 030 00 Fax: +46-8-555 031 00 www.foi.se

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Welcome message from the ISCRAM2009 Conference and Program Chairs Dear ISCRAM2009 participant, It is our pleasure to welcome you here at The University of Gothenburg to the sixth International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM2009. First of all, we would like to thank you for your efforts in making this conference an outstanding collection of contributions with interesting and, we hope, engrossing sessions. Without those of you who took on the challenge and the responsibility for creating sessions, soliciting and reviewing papers, we could not have realized this meeting. We are also grateful for the support from our primary partner organizations University of Gothenburg and Viktoria Institute, Lindholmen Science Park, Linköping University, and are happy to acknowledge the appreciated financial support of our Sponsors, FOI – Swedish Defence Research Agency, PDC – Prolog Development Center, Swedish Research Council (Gold Sponsors), Thales (Silver Sponsor) and the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (Bronze Sponsor). It is justified to state that this sixth edition of the ISCRAM conference is a very significant meeting for the ISCRAM community in at least two important aspects. First of all, the steadily growing number of submitted high quality papers and registered participants indicate that the decision we made to alternate the conference annually between Europe and the USA was a good decision. Apparently, alternating the location between the two continents brings an inspiring influx of fresh ideas and new people, extending the scope and relevance of the ISCRAM meeting, in both continents, year by year. Secondly, ISCRAM 2009 will host the very first ISCRAM Association meeting. Moving ISCRAM into a formal organization is an important step for us as a community in order to grow and intense our boundary spanning initatives with other organizations in this field. We are all looking forward for an exciting first general meeting. The diversity of the conference program is a reflection of – and a tribute to – our community members’ enthusiasm, creativity and expertise. All of us who have been involved in the activities of ISCRAM and the meetings over the past five years believe in the need for a community that brings together those working in this very challenging application domain of Information and Communications Technology. In this, the iscram.org website clearly remains the central place for announcing and distributing all ISCRAM-related information. With the addition of iscram.org/live, we are now able to make visible much of your work by the use of web 2.0 technology. Our Facebook group, now with more than 200 hundred members, is used for sending out invitations for special events (such as the traditional pre-conference informal get-together) and posting announcements of interest to this community. If you are not there yet, have a look and join the ISCRAM group there!

Most of you are also aware that, in addition to the annual ISCRAM conference, we have another great conference in China at the Harbin Engineering University. If you have not been there yet, you should most definitely consider a visit for the next edition! Your primary hosts for this meeting at University of Gothenburg (GU) are the Viktoria Institute and the Department of Applied Information Technology (AIT) at University of Gothenburg. You will find many of GU/AIT faculty and students wearing some special additions to their badges indicating they are there to help answer any questions you have at any time. We certainly are indebted to the many people at GU whose hard work made this meeting a success. We feel confident that the diverse program will lead everyone to discover some new and interesting viewpoints and findings. The ISCRAM2009 conference is a truly collaborative effort, which would have been impossible without the hard work by the track chairs, the special session chairs and all the reviewers. We are also happy for all the support we have received from previous conference organizers. A special recognition should be sent the ISCRAM2009 Honorary Chair, Murray Turoff for his advice along the work with the conference. All the hard work is paying off. The Swedish Research Council assessment of the conference states “the

ISCRAM-conference has high academic quality and is the leading conference with its domain”. We are very proud for this statement and it shows that we as a community are doing well. We are also happy to announce that there will be an ISCRAM-summerschool this year as well as an ISCRAM-China Conference scheduled for January 2010. We hope ISCRAM2009 will match the expectations that were set at the preceding meetings, and we wish your participation in the sixth International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management to be an enjoyable and fruitful one. Enjoy the meeting!

Conference co-chair

Conference co-chair

Viktoria Institute

Tilburg University

Program Chair

Local Organizing Chair

Amaryllis Consulting

University of Gothenburg & Chalmers

Jonas Landgren

Susanne Jul

Bartel Van de Walle

Urban Nulden

ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 11

ISCRAM2009 SCHEDULE SUNDAY

Sahana Open Source Workshop

Sahana Open Source Workshop Organizer: Bartel Van de Walle & Ingo Simonis

SUNDAY 10th: PRE-CONFERENCE EVENTS Location: IT-University, Forskningsgången 6, Lindholmen 08:00 Registration opens 09:00 - 12:00 PhD-Colloquium Organizers: David Mendonca, Julie Dugdale, and Lucy Gunawan.

12:00 -13:00 LUNCH BREAK 13:00 - 16:00 PhD-Colloquium

12:00 - 14:00 Tutorial: Utilizing Crisis Management Exercises as research instrument Organizer: Dr. Joeri van Laere, University of Skovde, Sweden 14:00 - 16:00 Workshop on Social Media for crisis response Organizer: Susanne Jul

16:00 - 17:30 Student Poster Session Organizer: Willem Muhren, Tilburg University 18:00 - ISCRAM 2009 Beer evening and informal get-together Location: Scandic Hotel Rubinen Avenyn

Mobile Information Technology for Emergency Response Workshop Organizer: Markus Klann & Jobst Löffler

12 - www.iscram.org

Room: ISCRAM-2

19:00 WELCOME RECEPTION At the City Hall of Gothenburg “Börsen”, Gustav Adolfs Torg.

Room: ISCRAM-1

10:00 – 10:30 COFFEE BREAK 10:30 – 12:00 PARALLEL SESSIONS Track: Humanitarian Actions and Track: Human-Computer Operations Interaction Session: Approaches to Information Session: Information Overload and Management Inclusivity Room: ISCRAM-1 Room: ISCRAM-2 12:00 – 14:00 LUNCH Location: ISCRAM2009 Lunch Venue 14:00 – 15:30 PARALLEL SESSIONS Track: Humanitarian Actions and Track: Human-Computer Operations Interaction Session: IT for Crisis Management in Session: Interactive Map Africa Technologies Room: ISCRAM-2 Room: ISCRAM-1 15:30 – 16:00 COFFEE BREAK 16:00 PARALLEL SESSIONS Track: Human-Computer Track: Humanitarian Actions and Interaction Operations Session: HCI Design & Requirements Session: Rapid Information Dissemination

07:30 Registration opens 08:45 Plenary Opening of the 2009 ISCRAM Conference Keynote presentation: Lars Hedström

Break-out Session: Practitioners Workshop Room: ISCRAM-4

Track: Standardization and Ontologies Session: Interoperability Room: ISCRAM-3

Room: ISCRAM-3

Room: ISCRAM-3

Organizers: Jiri Trnka, Margit Kristensen

Break-out Session: Practitioners Workshop

Room: ISCRAM-4

Room: ISCRAM-3

Track: Research Methods Session: Analysis, Testing & Evaluation

Track: Standardization and Ontologies Session: Architectures

Track: Open Track Session: Local Communities and Government Collaboration

Location: University of Gothenburg, School of Business, Economics & Law, Vasagatan 1, Gothenburg

MONDAY 11th: CONFERENCE DAY 1

ISCRAM2009 SCHEDULE MONDAY

ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 13

ISCRAM2009 SCHEDULE TUESDAY

TUESDAY 12th: CONFERENCE DAY 2

Track: Open Track Session: Computing Situation Awareness

Location: University of Gothenburg, School of Business, Economics & Law, Vasagatan 1, Gothenburg 07:30 Registration opens 08:45 – 10:00 Plenary Announcements Keynote presentation: Prof Martha Grabowski 10:00 – 10:30 COFFEE BREAK 10:30 – 12:00 PARALLEL SESSIONS Track: Human-Computer Track: Collaboration and Social Interaction Networking Session: Crisis Communication Session: Decision-Making

Room: ISCRAM-3

Room: ISCRAM-3 Room: ISCRAM-2 Room: ISCRAM-1 12:00 - 14:30 LUNCH BUFFET with HANDS-ON DEMO SESSION and POSTERS 14:30 - 16:00 PARALLEL SESSIONS Track: Collaboration and Social Track: Intelligent Systems Track: Research Methods Networking Session: Knowledge, Training and Session: Ethnography and Field Session: Designing for Collaboration Smart Environments Reports Room: ISCRAM-1 Room: ISCRAM-2 16:00 – 16:30 COFFEE BREAK 16:30 – 17:30 ISCRAM ASSOCIATION MEETING Location: Malmstensalen 18:00 BOAT TRANSPORT TO CONFERENCE DINNER Departure point: Stenpiren

Break-out Session: Presentation of IMMAP.ORG

Room: ISCRAM-4

14 - www.iscram.org

15:30 – 16:15 CONFERENCE CLOSING Community Awards ISCRAM 2010 – Preview Closing ceremony

10:00 – 10:30 COFFEE BREAK 10:30 – 12:00 PARALLEL SESSIONS Track: Humanitarian Actions and Track: Collaboration and Social Operations Networking Session: Modeling of Humanitarian Session: People and Social Media Operation Room: ISCRAM-2 Room: ISCRAM-1 12:00 – 14.00 LUNCH 14:00 – 15:30 PARALLEL SESSIONS Track: Intelligent Systems Track: Collaboration and Social Session: Simulation and Resource Networking Allocation Session: Lightweight Stakeholder Collaboration Room: ISCRAM-2 Room: ISCRAM-1

07:30 Registration opens 08:45 – 10:00 PLENARY Announcements Keynote presentation: Katrin Verclas Room: Malmstensalen

Room: ISCRAM-4 Room: ISCRAM-3

Room: ISCRAM-3

Track: Open Track Session: Information Processing in Environmental Crisis

Break-out Session: ISCRAM-China & China EMrgency Response System.

Track: Open Track Session: Dependability and Vulnerability

Location: University of Gothenburg, School of Business, Economics & Law, Vasagatan 1, Gothenburg

WEDNESDAY 13th: CONFERENCE DAY 3

ISCRAM2009 SCHEDULE WEDNESDAY

ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 15

General Information

Social Programme

Location

ISCRAM 2009 Beer evening and informal get-together at Scandic Hotel Rubinen.

Göteborg is a town with the pulse of a big city although it has a natural and relaxed charm. Within comfortable walking distance you will find everything from worldclass restaurants and cosy cafés to fascinating cultural experiences and excellent shopping. The sea is just a tram ride away. More information about Göteborg, please visit the official website: www.goteborg.com

Travel

Göteborg has two main airports: Landvetter Airport (GOT), served by all major European airlines, and Göteborg City Airport (GCA), served mainly by Ryanair. In addition. For public transportation in Göteborg please visit: www.vasttrafik.se/en/

Pre-Conference Venue (10th of May)

The pre-conference activities including the PhDcolloquium take place at the IT-University (across the river of Göta Älv). Address: Forskningsgången 6, Lindholmen.

- Sunday May 10th, 18.00-21.00 Welcome to the informal “Pub Evening” arranged for ISCRAM 2009 participants! This event is taking place at Scandic Hotel Rubinen, located on Kungsportsavenyn 24. Three beers/or glasses of wine are included.

Welcome Reception at Börsen

- Monday May 11th, 19.00 On Monday evening we are invited to a Welcome Reception hosted by the City of Gothenburg. Drinks and a light buffet will be served. The reception takes place at “Börsen” (The City Hall) at Gustav Adolfs Torg, the historic heart of Gothenburg. Please see map for exact location.

Conference Dinner at Långedrags Värdshus

Conference Venue (11th - 13th of May)

- Tuesday May 12th, 18.00 We will start with a boat trip to the restaurant called “Långedrags Värdshus”, where we will enjoy a three course dinner. The restaurant has one of the most picturesque seaside locations in Gothenburg, with a fantastic view of the archipelago and the entrance to Gothenburg harbor.

Registration desk

Please note that the boat leaves from Stenpiren at 18.00 (the location is marked in the map)

The conference will take place at School of Business, Economics and Law at Göteborg University. Address: Vasagatan 1, Gothenburg

The registration desk is located inside the entrance of the School of Business, Economics and Law at Göteborg University, Vasagatan 1. Please contact a member of staff there if you have any queries or concerns during the conference. The official opening hours of the registration desk are: Monday May 11 07.30 - 17.00 Tuesday May 12 07:30 - 17.00 Wednesday May 13 07:30 - 15.00

Name badges

Your name badge that was given to you when you registered is your admission to the congress, please make sure you wear it at all times! Please also wear your name badge during the social events.

Coffe/Tea breaks

Coffe/Tea and refreshments will be served during breaks in the corridors at floor 2 and 3 at School of Business, Economics and Law.

Lunches

Lunches will be served at Odd Fellow, Vasagatan 9, only five minutes walk from the conference venue. (Please see location marked in the map).

Internet access

Free Internet connection is provided at the conference venues.

16 - www.iscram.org

After the dinner buses will be arranged for transportation back to the city centre.

Official hotels:

These are the official hotels of the congress: Scandic Hotel Rubinen Kungsportsavenyn 24 SE - 400 14 Göteborg Tel: +46 (0)31 751 54 00 Hotel Vasa Viktoriagatan 6 SE-411 25 Göteborg Tel: +46 (0)31 17 36 30 Spar Hotel Majorna Karl Johansgatan 66-70 SE-414 54 Göteborg Tel: +46 31 751 07 00 Spar Hotel Gårda N:a Kustbanegatan 15-17 SE-416 64 Göteborg Tel: +46 31 752 03 00 SGS Veckobostäder – Student accommodation Utlandagatan 24 SE-412 80 Göteborg Tel: +46 (0)31 333 63 90

How to get to... How to get to the IT University - Pre Conference Sunday May 10th (Address: Forskningsgången 6, Lindholmen) From: Brunnsparken: (close to the Central Station)

Bus no 16 (towards Eketrägatan)

Exit at: Lindholmen

From: Spar Hotel Gårda:

Bus no 60 (towards Masthugget) Change to bus no 16 (towards Eketrägatan)

Exit at: Brunnsparken Exit at: Lindholmen

From: Spar Hotel Majorna:

Tram no 3 (towards Kålltorp) Tram no 9 (towards Angered) *Change to bus no 16 (towards Eketrägatan)

Exit at: Brunnsparken* Exit at: Brunnsparken* Exit at: Lindholmen

From: SGS Veckobostäder:

Bus no 42 (towards Gerrebacka) Bus no 52 (towards Skogome) *Change to bus no 16 (towards Eketrägatan)

Exit at: Brunnsparken* Exit at: Brunnsparken* Exit at: Lindholmen

How to get to the Hotel Scandic Rubinen - Pub Evening Sunday May 10th at 18.00: (Address: Kungsportsavenyn 24) From: Central station:

Tram no 3 (towards Marklandsgatan) Tram no 4 (towards Mölndal) Tram no 7 (towards Tynnered)

Exit at: Valand Exit at: Valand Exit at: Valand

From: Brunnsparken: (close to the Central station)

Tram no 3 (towards Marklandsgatan) Tram no 4 (towards Mölndal) Tram no 5 (towards Torp) Tram no 7 (towards Tynnered) Tram no 10 (towards Guldheden)

Exit at: Valand Exit at: Valand Exit at: Valand Exit at: Valand Exit at: Valand

(Please note that it is also walking distance to Scandic Rubinen from the Central station and Brunnsparken) From: Spar Hotel Gårda: From: Spar Hotel Majorna: From: SGS Veckobostäder:

Bus no 60 (towards Masthugget) Exit at: Central station Then please see directions as from the Central station in the information above. Tram no 3 (towards Kålltorp)

Exit at: Valand

Bus no 42 (towards Gerrebacka)

Exit at: Valand

ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 17

How to get to the Conference Venue - School of Business, Economics and Law (Handelshögskolan): (Address: Vasagatan 1) From: Brunnsparken:

Tram no 2 (towards Högsbotorp) Tram no 3 (towards Marklandsgatan) Tram no 7 (towards Tynnered)

Exit at: Handelshögskolan Exit at: Vasa Viktoriagatan* Exit at: Vasaplatsen*

*Then 10 minutes walk to the Venue (walk along Vasagatan until you reach Vasagatatan no 1 (Handelshögskolan), or change to tram no 2 (towards Högsbotorp) and exit at: Handelshögskolan From: Central station:

Tram no 2 (towards Högsbotorp) Tram no 1 (towards Tynnered) Tram no 3 (towards Marklandsgatan) Tram no 7 (towards Tynnered) Tram no 9 (towards Kungssten)

Exit at: Handelshögskolan Exit at: Vasa Viktoriagatan* Exit at: Vasa Viktoriagatan* Exit at: Vasaplatsen* Exit at: Vasa Viktoriagatan*

*Then 10 minutes walk to the Venue (walk along Vasagatan until you reach Vasagatan no 1 (Handelshögskolan), or change to tram no 2 (towards Högsbotorp) exit at: Handelshögskolan From: Spar Hotel Gårda:

Bus no 60 (towards Masthugget) change to tram no 2 (towards Högsbotorp)

Exit at: Central station Exit at: Handelshögskolan

From: Spar Hotel Majorna:

Tram no 3 (towards Kålltorp) Tram no 9 (towards Angered)

Exit at: Vasa Viktoriagatan* Exit at: Vasa Viktoriagatan*

*Then 10 minutes walk to the Venue (walk along Vasagatan until you reach Vasagatan no 1 (Handelshögskolan), or change to tram no 2 (towards Högsbotorp) and exit at: Handelshögskolan From: SGS Veckobostäder:

Bus no 42 (towards Gerrebacka) Change to tram no 2 (towards Högsbotorp) Bus no 52 (towards Skogome) Change to tram no 2 (towards Högsbotorp)

Exit at: Korsvägen Exit at: Handelshögskolan Exit at: Brunnsparken Exit at: Handelshögskolan

Tickets:

Within Göteborg buses require pre-paid cash tickets which can be purchased at the nearest Pressbyrån or 7-eleven. If you are travelling by tram, the best option is to buy a cash ticket/one-way ticket from the ticket machine aboard (cost one way: 25 SEK). Cash tickets are valid for all services within the Municipality of Göteborg during 90 minutes If you have a Swedish mobile phone account, you can also pay for your ticket by sending the code: GV via SMS to 724 50 (25 SEK in charge). SMS tickets are valid for all services within the Municipality of Göteborg during 90 minutes

18 - www.iscram.org

ISCRAM2009 PROGRAM OVERVIEW SUNDAY 10th 09:00 - 17:30 09:00 - 16:00 09:00 - 16:00 14:00 - 16:00 12:00 - 14:00 14:00 - 16:00 16:00 - 17:00

PhD-Colloquium. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SIG Workshops. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SAHANA Opensource Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mobile Information Technology for Emergency Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tutorials & Hands-on Workshops Tutorial: Utilizing Crisis management exercises as research instrument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Workshop: Social Media for Crisis Response. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Student Poster Session. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23 23 23 23 24 24 24

MONDAY 11th 08:45 - 09:00 09:00 - 10:00 10:30 -12:00



PLENARY: Opening and Welcome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 KEYNOTE Lars Hedström (Prime Minister’s Office Sweden) Information needs for Societal Security in the new Threat Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 PARALLEL TRACKS

Track: Human-Computer Interaction

Session: Information Overload and Inclusivity Using Text Analysis for Information Overload in Pan Flu Planning and Response . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Sensemaking and Information Management in Humanitarian Disaster Response: Observations from the TRIPLEX Exercise. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Identifying and confirming information and system quality requirements for multi-agency disaster management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26



Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations



Track: Open Track



Track: Standardization and Ontologies



Track: Break-Out



Track: Human-Computer Interaction

Session: Approaches to Information Management Building a humanitarian information system: the experience of the Dynamic COMPAS software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Information Management and Technology Issues Addressed by Humanitarian Relief Coordination Bodies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 An optimization model for humanitarian relief volunteer management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Session: Local Communities and Government Collaboration The ARGOS CBRN Information System and Consortium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Action Research Supported Implementation of a Crisis Competence Centre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Session: Architectures Towards an interoperable data model for forest fire reports. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Exploring Development of Service-Oriented C2 Systems for Emergency Response . . . . . . . . . 28 Reconsidering information management roles and capabilities in disaster response decision-making units. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 14:00 -15:30 PARALLEL TRACKS

Session: Practitioners Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Session: Interactive Map Technologies Early flood detection and mapping for humanitarian response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Spatiotemporal Mashups: A Survey of Current Tools to Inform Next Generation Crisis Support. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 An Indoor Positioning System for Improved Action Force Command and Disaster Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29



Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations

Session: IT for Crisis Management in Africa IT Infrastructure Enabling Open Access for Flood Risk Preparedness in South Africa . . . . . . . . 29 The Southern African Advanced Fire Information System. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 AÏDA – Providing a framework for objective assessment of ICT for Disaster Risk Management in Africa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 19



Track: Standardization and Ontologies



Track: Human-Computer Interaction



Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations



Track: Research Methods

Session: Interoperability Collaborative process design for Mediation Information System Engineering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Using Architectures for Semantic Interoperability to Create Journal Clubs for Emergency Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Information Management for Crisis Response in WORKPAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 16:00 - 17:30 PARALLEL TRACKS Session: HCI Design & Requirements User Acceptance of Community Emergency Alert Technology: A Case Study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Mega-Collaboration: The Inspiration and Development of an Interface for Large-Scale Disaster Response. . . . . . . . 30 Designing for Firefighters—Building Empathy through Live Action Role-Playing. . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Session: Rapid Information Dissemination Towards an IP-Based Alert Message Delivery System. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Geographically Visualizing Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP) Information. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Rapid Geo-Image Communications for Disaster Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Session: Analysis, Testing & Evaluation GDIA: a Cognitive Task Analysis Protocol to Capture the Information Requirements of Emergency First Responders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 A Principled Method of Scenario Design for Testing Emergency Response Decision-Making. . . 32 Evaluating the Impact of Improvisation on the Incident Command System: A Modified Single Case Study using the DDD Simulator. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

TUESDAY 12th

08:45 - 09:00 PLENARY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 09:00 - 10:00 KEYNOTE Prof Martha Grabowski (LeMoyne College) Highly Reliable Crisis and Disaster Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 10:30 - 12:00 PARALLEL TRACKS



Track: Collaboration and Social Networking



Track: Human-Computer Interaction



Track: Open Track

Session: Decision-Making Group Decision-Making Method in the field of Coal Mine Safety Management Based on AHP with Clustering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Crisis Decision Making Through a Shared Integrative Negotiation Mental Model. . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Towards hybrid rational-naturalistic decision support for Command & Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Session: Crisis Communication CAP-ONES: An Emergency Notification System for all. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Computer Supported Collaborative Training in Crisis Communication Management. . . . . . . . . 34 Towards a Distributed Crisis Response Communication System. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Session: Computing Situation Awareness Computed Ontology-based Situation Awareness of Multi-User Observations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Emergency Response Model Toward Situational Awareness Improvement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crowd control by multiple cameras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12:00 - 14:00 DEMOS AND LUNCH Hands-On Demo Session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14:30 - 16:00 PARALLEL TRACKS



Track: Collaboration and Social Networking

35 35 35 35

Session: Designing for Collaboration Designing Collario for Continuous Reviewing and Practicing of Emergency Plans to Ensure Complex System Safety. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Information Sharing Using Live Video in Emergency Response Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Hastily Formed Networks for Disaster Response: Technical Heterogeneity and Virtual Pockets of Local Order. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 20 - www.iscram.org



Track: Intelligent Systems



Track: Research Methods

Session: Knowledge, Training and Smart Environments OpenKnowledge at work: exploring centralized and decentralized information gathering in emergency contexts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Self-Organizing Resource Network for Traffic Accident Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Crisis response simulation combining discrete-event and agent-based modeling. . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Session: Ethnography and Field Reports Red, white and blue with a little bit of green: an ethnographic study into the Emergency Response Rooms in the City of Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Socio-spatial implications of converging physical and digital infrastructures for crisis management: Ethnography of two service technician working environments of a power provider company. . . 38 Sharing Knowledge: How to Highlight Proven Experience in the Swedish Armed Forces. . . . . . 38

WEDNESDAY 13th 08:45 - 09:00 09:00 - 10:00 10:30 - 12:00



PLENARY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 KEYNOTE Katrin Verclas (MobileActive.org) Flood, Famine, and Mobile Phones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 PARALLEL TRACKS

Track: Collaboration and Social Networking

Session: People and Social Media An Online Social Network For Emergency Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Repairing Human Infrastructure in War Zones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Twitter Adoption and Use in Mass Convergence and Emergency Events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40



Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations



Track: Open Track



Track: Break-Out



Track: Collaboration and Social Networking



Track: Intelligent Systems



Track: Open Track

Session: Modeling of Humanitarian Operation Learning from previous humanitarian operations, a Business Process Reengineering approach . . . 40 Using a Workflow Management System to Manage Emergency Plans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 How Humanitarian Logistics Information Systems Can Improve Humanitarian Logistics: A View from the Field. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Session: Dependability and Vulnerability An Indicator Framework to Assess the Vulnerability of Industrial Sectors against Indirect Disaster Losses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Dependability of IT Systems in Municipal Emergency Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Capabilities of C2 Systems for Crisis Management in Local Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Session: ISCRAM-China & China EMrgency Response System The ISCRAM-China Conference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 14:00 - 15:30 PARALLEL TRACKS Session: Lightweight Stakeholder Collaboration Disasters2.0: Application of Web2.0 technologies in emergency situations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Web based macroseismic survey: fast information exchange and elaboration of seismic intensity effects in Italy.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Expectation of Connectedness and Cell Phone Use in Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Session: Simulation and Resource Allocation Using Computer Simulation for Emergency Response: Lessons Learned from the FireGrid Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Market Based Adaptive Resource Allocation for Distributed Rescue Teams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 DMT-EOC – A combined system for the Decision Support and Training of EOC Members. . . . . 43 Session: Information Processing in Environmental Crisis Approaches to visualisation of uncertainties to decision makers in an operational Decision Support System. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Central response to large chemical accidents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Integrating Scenario-Based Reasoning into Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 21

DEMO CONTRIBUTIONS - TUESDAY 12th

12:00 - 14:00

HANDS-ON DEMO SESSION Towards a Smart Control Room for Crisis Response Using Visual Perception of Users. . . . . . . . . The Dynamic COMPAS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On Scene Commander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multimedia Tool for Analysis of Distributed Tactical Operations - F-REX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Observer Tool for Data Collection in Distributed Environments - NBOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Decision Support Tool for the Continuity of the Petroleum Supply Chain Using GIS and Systems Simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Information Sharing Using Live Video in Emergency Response Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mobile Decision Support for operative field commanders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Operational Activity Security Information System (OASIS). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

22 - www.iscram.org

44 44 44 45 45 45 45 46 46

The pre-conference events will be held at the IT-university at Lindholmen. See map for directions.

09:00 - 17:30 PhD-Colloquium 09:00 - 16:00

Chairs: David Mendonca, New Jersey Institute of Technology. USA Julie Dugdale, Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble. France Coordinator: Lucy Gunawan, Delft University of Technology Room: ISCRAM 1 The goal of the Ph.D. Student Colloquium of the ISCRAM 2009 conference is to develop and sustain a network of junior scholars conducting high quality research in the area of Information Systems for crisis response and management. Accomplishment of this goal is supported through a one-day program taking place immediately prior to the main ISCRAM conference that is designed to foster community, excellence in student scholarship and advancement in the profession. Eligible participants are Ph.D. students who, by the time of the symposium, will not have defended their dissertation. The colloquium is targeted towards those students seeking careers as researchers in academic settings. Up to ten students will be accepted for the consortium. They will be joined by faculty mentors from the US and Europe who are actively involved both in the ISCRAM community and in ISCRAM-related scholarship. The colloquium will consist of discussions, presentations and shared activities on each of the following topics: Overview of career development strategies, Building and participating in research networks, Completing the Ph.D., Finding and hitting the right publication targets, Writing successful grant proposals

SIG Workshops 09:00 -16:00

SAHANA Opensource Workshop Chairs: Bartel van de Walle, Tilburg University. The Netherlands Ingo Simonis, Geospatial Research. Germany Room: ISCRAM 2 The Sahana Free and Open Source Disaster Management System was conceived during the 2004 Sri Lanka Tsunami. The system was developed to help manage the disaster and was deployed by a government’s Center of National Operations (CNO), which included the Center of

Humanitarian Agencies (CHA). Based on the success of this initial application and the dire need for good disaster management solutions, particularly to handle large-scale disasters, Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) funded a second phase through LSF (Lanka Software. SIDA did much to foster the capability of the project and the global community, now 170+ strong around it. This workshop will bring Sahana developers, experts, and users together to discuss the current status of Sahana, future developments, additional requirements, usability, and experiences made in disaster management missions. The workshop is organized by the IRMA project team. IRMA, Integrated Risk Management for Africa, is a Collaborative Research Project, cofunded by the European Commission as part of the 7th Framework Program.

14:00 - 16:00

Mobile Information Technology for Emergency Response Chairs: Markus Klann, Fraunhofer FIT Germany Jobst Löffler, Fraunhofer IAIS Germany Room: ISCRAM 3 Many mobile ICT systems for emergency response look nice on slides or when demonstrated at fairs. But looking at them many people including prospective users get an uneasy feeling about actually using them during an emergency. We believe that these concerns are mostly well justified. Addressing them requires covering two distinct aspects. First, the technologies and designs must match the actual requirements of the fields. Given the diverse and extreme nature of many emergency response operations this is already surprisingly difficult to achieve. Second, even systems that match the requirements of the field still have to earn the acceptance of their users to use them efficiently, effectively and with informed confidence. Understandably, emergency workers are particularly reluctant about adopting new systems because they have to rely on them for the effectiveness of their support efforts or even their own lives. The particularity of supporting emergency response with mobile ICT is that the requirements and constraints of the domain are especially hard to study and understand and that in terms of both the products and the process of design very specific solutions are required. What we would like to offer with this workshop is an opportunity for emergency response practitioners as well as researchers and developers of mobile ICT to exchange their experiences with the challenges of creating mobile ICT for emergencies.

ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 23

Papers, Presentations and Demos

SUNDAY 10th

Tutorials & Hands-on Workshops 12:00 - 14:00

that are being developed specifically for crisis response and management. We will then create opportunities, throughout the conference, for all conference attendees to share their experiences with each other and with the unfortunates who are not in Gothenburg. We welcome all levels of experience as we help each other learn about and explore the power of social mobile media.

Many researchers may have the problem that it is hard to identify case studies to study how crisis management actually evolves in practice, or to test whether their solutions really would work in a real crisis. Utilizing crisis management training might be an interesting alternative. There is a growing understanding in public and private organizations that, in order to be prepared for “the worst that may happen us”, regular training of personnel, procedures and systems is needed. So all kind of organizations might actually be “practicing” crisis management once or several times a year. From a research perspective these are interesting occasions. A group of people or a group of organizations is conducting a similar kind of exercise several times. There is a strong interest from these trainees to get detailed feedback on their performance. Sounds like almost perfect conditions for a set of research experiments. However, there are of course some pitfalls which can be compared to the general dilemmas of action research, e.g. serving the organizational change process as well as the research process. The tutorial has a “down to earth” - “how to” perspective. The objective is that participants gather initial knowledge and skills on how they might utilize emergency management training exercises as research instruments IN THEIR RESEARCH PROCESS. All presented issues will include a lot of practical examples.

Participants will need to bring their own physical technologies. Wireless internet access will be provided.

Tutorial: Utilizing Crisis management exercises as research instrument Chair: Joeri van Laere, University of Skövde. Sweden Room: ISCRAM 4

14:00 - 16:00

Workshop: Social Media for Crisis Response Chair: Susanne Jul, Amaryllis Consulting. USA Room: ISCRAM 4 Question: Tweeting, texting, facebooking, skyping, voicing, blogging, flickring, youtubing. What do these words have in common? The plethora of popular social networking technologies has spawned a plethora of verbs denoting their use for communication and collaboration, and created a sea of confusion and information that few busy professionals have time or energy to attempt to navigate. This workshop offers a brief introduction to concepts and categories of social mobile media – social networking technologies that can be used on the go – and then provides participants the opportunity to get started with and practice using some that are proving particularly useful to ISCRAM researchers and practitioners. We focus on tools that are free and freely available, including Twitter, Facebook, Latitude, Blogger, and highlight a few

24 - www.iscram.org

Student Poster Session 16:00 - 17:00

Chair: Willem Murhen, Tilburg University. The Netherlands Room: ISCRAM 4 The ISCRAM2009 Student Poster Session offers a great venue for students to present their research plans and/ or (initial) research results. Many other students and more experienced researchers will be present to discuss the featured work. Everybody is welcome to witness the latest research developments and new and fresh ISCRAM insights!

08:45 - 09:00 PLENARY: Opening and Welcome

09:00 - 10:00 KEYNOTE

Lars Hedström (Prime Minister’s Office Sweden) Information needs for Societal Security in the new Threat Environment

Lars Hedström Deputy Director General Crisis Management Coordination Secretariat Prime Minister’s Office, Sweden How do decision-makers in homeland/societal security positions get the information they need in an allhazards environment? The all-hazards world requires ability to work with a cross-disciplinary approach and to pick up weak, or contradictory, signals and interpret them correctly, which stands out as a key process. The customer base for all-hazards information is quite diverse, and this creates challenges for experts in designing collection strategies and developing useful products. A part of the solution is more mutual understanding and stronger relationships. Lars Hedström was previously with the Swedish Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) as Deputy Director General. Before that he held the position as Deputy Director General of the Swedish Rescue Services Agency. In 2000 Mr Hedström was seconded to NATO Headquarters, Civil Emergency Planning Directorate. He is a former Chief Fire Officer. Lars Hedström served as head of mission for the Swedish Search and Rescue Team after the earthquakes in Turkey 1999. In January 2005 he was head of the Swedish Rescue and Support Team in Thailand after the tsunami catastrophe and in October 2005 the Swedish Foreign Ministry requested his assistance in Islamabad after the earthquake in the north of Pakistan.

10:30 - 12:00 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Human-Computer Interaction

Session: Information Overload and Inclusivity Chairs: Murray Turoff, New Jersey Institute of Technology. USA Soenke Ziesche, United Nations Development Program. UN Room: ISCRAM-1 Using Text Analysis for Information Overload in Pan Flu Planning and Response Collins, Linn Marks. (1), Blake, Miriam. (2), Hoare, Geoffrey. (2), Mane, Ketan K. (1), Martinez, Mark L.B. (1), Pittman, Jack. (2), Powell, James E. (1), Roman, Jorge H. (1), Spearing, Shelly. (1), White, Rhonda. (2), Yao, Xiang. (1), 1: Florida Department of Health, United States of America; 2: Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States of America The constantly changing plans, policies, expert opinions, media reports and situation data creates debilitating information overload in public health and medical emergencies. Automated content analysis and document linking with Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Emergency Situation Overview and Synthesis (E-SOS) tools can help planners, situation unit analysts and public information officers (PIOs) find and use the important information. LANL worked with Florida Department of Health_s disaster preparedness and response staff to simulate three tasks: - Planning: Revising the interrelated set of state-level Pan Flu Plans. - Public Information and Risk Communication: Tracking media outlets, blogs and other fast-moving information is essential for PIO_s to effectively manage media relations, risk communication and rumor control. - Maintaining Situational Awareness: Managing diverse information sources in the Health and Medical Situation Unit (ESF-8) at the state Emergency Operations Center. The tools developed at LANL allowed the team to collect information from heterogeneous sources; integrate information using semantic web technologies; and link information using intuitive frames of reference such as geo-location. The ability to locate related information while writing plans, situation reports or public information releases was assessed; human factors intrinsic to the work setting and the web interface were studied; and a follow-up study was designed.

ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 25

Papers, Presentations and Demos

MONDAY 11th

Sensemaking and Information Management in Humanitarian Disaster Response: Observations from the TRIPLEX Exercise Muhren, Willem., Van de Walle, Bartel. Tilburg University, The Netherlands The United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) system is designed to assist the United Nations in providing information during the first phase of a sudden-onset emergency and in the coordination of incoming international relief at the site of the emergency. In the immediate aftermath of such an emergency, the UNDAC team will set up an OnSite Operations Coordination Center (OSOCC) from where the operational activities of the humanitarian organizations responding to the emergency are coordinated. Information management is a key aspect in this phase as the information gathering, processing, and disseminating activities will determine the timeliness and appropriateness of the response by the international humanitarian community. Through participatory observation in the international humanitarian _TRIPLEX_ exercise we explore how information managers in the OSOCC make sense of the disaster, how the immediate needs are assessed, and discuss how information systems could improve Sensemaking in these activities. Identifying and confirming information and system quality requirements for multi-agency disaster management Bharosa, Nitesh., Zuurmond, Arre., Appelman, Jacco., van Zanten, Bart Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Information quality and system quality are well studied requirements for information systems success in relatively stable, mono-actor business environments. However, despite previous work on these requirements, there meaning and importance is still understudied when it comes to the complex and dynamic context of multi-agency disaster management. In order to design successful information systems for multi-agency disaster management, a context related understanding of the concepts and the hurdles which need to be overcome is necessary. Accordingly, the goal of this paper is to identify and confirm critical information quality and system quality requirements for the development and deployment of multi-agency disaster management information systems. The results of our interviews with several information architects indicate that while information quality dimensions are considered to be very important, they are hard to measure and address, and that currently much effort is being put into improving system quality dimensions such as interoperability and ease of use.

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Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations

Session: Approaches to Information Management Chairs: Carleen Maitland, Penn State Univeristy. USA Bartel van de Walle, Tilburg University. The Netherlands Room: ISCRAM-2 Building a humanitarian information system: the experience of the Dynamic COMPAS software Sarrat, Olivier. Groupe URD, France The humanitarian sector began to look at the issue of Quality in the mid-nineties. The Quality COMPAS framework was developed in 2004 to provide humanitarian actors with a Quality assurance method, which could be adapted for use in any intervention context. In 2006, the first version of the Dynamic COMPAS free software was released. Its core idea was to provide both a dynamic implementation of the Quality COMPAS and a knowledge management tool to build and share the institutional memory of an organization. For two years, the development of this Humanitarian Information Management System has continuously moved in three parallel directions: - the software has become increasingly adaptable to the requirements of each specific organization.- the content of the software has grown to encompass more and more “”down-toearth”” project management features such as report generation, indicator follow-up or field-headquarters communication.- the software development process has become increasingly collaborative: a free software model is being implemented and a needs assessment for new software aimed at headquarters is under way. Information Management and Technology Issues Addressed by Humanitarian Relief Coordination Bodies Maitland, Carleen F., Ngamassi Tchouakeu, Louis-Marie., Tapia, Andrea H. Penn State University, United States of America Coordination bodies that attempt to overcome coordination barriers in humanitarian relief face many challenges. Among them are general organizational barriers to coordination as well as functionally-oriented barriers arising specifically from information management (IM) and information technology (IT) issues. Based on data collected from three coordination bodies, the research presented here examines IM and IT-related barriers, identifying similarities and differences between them as well as requirements for resolving them. The research finds that while many similarities exist, resolving IM issues typically requires higher levels of organizational change as compared to IT-related barriers. The research concludes that coordination bodies need to address a mixture of IT and IM related issues both to foster better coordination but also to ensure their efforts are successful.

One of the challenges of humanitarian organizations is that there exist limited decision technologies that fit their needs. It has also been pointed out that those organizations experience coordination difficulties with volunteers willing to help. The purpose of this paper is to help address those challenges through the development of a decision model to assist in the management of volunteers. While employee workforce management models have been the topic of extensive research over the past decades, no work has focused on the problem of managing humanitarian relief volunteers. In this paper, we discuss a series of principles from the field of volunteer management and develop a multi criteria optimization model to assist in the assignment of volunteers to tasks. We present an illustrative example and analyze a solution methodology where the decision maker exercises his/her preferences by trading-off conflicting objectives. Conclusions, limitations, and directions for future research are also discussed.

Track: Open Track

Session: Local Communities and Government Collaboration Chair: Simon French, Manchester Business School. UK Room: ISCRAM-3 The ARGOS CBRN Information System and Consortium Schou-Jensen, Leo. (1), Hoe, Steen Cord. (2), Holo, Eldri Nadlan. (3) 1: PDC, Denmark; 2: DEMA, Denmark; 3: NRPA, Norway A presentation and live demonstration of the ARGOS Information System for responding to incidents with Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear releases. ARGOS is the result of 15 years continuously development and provides now a very mature system. ARGOS has been in operational use for more than 10 years. ARGOS is a user driven and user friendly system, focused on operational use. The ARGOS consortium does now include 13 countries and includes a license free nationwide use for all member organizations involved in public emergency management. It will be presented how the ARGOS user’s consortium is created and the experience from the first 8 years as well as future challenges. Action Research Supported Implementation of a Crisis Competence Centre Harnesk, Dan., Lindström, John., Samuelsson, Sören. Luleå University of Technology, Sweden

of a regional crisis competence centre in Sweden. The overall research approach utilizes action research methodology to support the development process. The overall development process is divided into three steps; early need finding, the organizational platform, and business development. This paper is devoted to the first phase _ early need finding _ which deals with the specific needs and demand of four Municipality organizations and how these requirements can be converged into a organizational setting that correspond to national crisis management strategies as well as regional responsibilities in cri-sis management. The research approach is action based and the theoretical considerations to support progress in development activities are from the Actor Network Theory (ANT). The main conclusion from the research is that the formation of a crisis competence centre revolves around sharing competences, and compromising between internal and external objectives in the progress towards a common goal.

Track: Standardization and Ontologies

Session: Architectures Chairs: Tom De Groeve, EC Joint Research Centre. Italy Chamindra de Silva. Sri Lanka Room: ISCRAM-4 Towards an interoperable data model for forest fire reports Hernández de Juan, María., Aedo, Ignacio., Diaz, Paloma., Diez, David., Montero, Susana. Universidad Carlos III Madrid, Spain Nowadays, forest fires are one of the most frequently natural hazards in the world. The fire stations are responsible to create reports, which will be used to different purposes like judicial affairs or statistical analysis. These reports describe the actions that have been carried out indicating the more relevant information. Different organizations can cooperate in the reports whether to create them, to consolidate them or to analyze from different perspectives the information they hold. In all of these cases, there are different and heterogeneous flows between autonomous or dependent organizations, which need to share information with a very different granularity. This paper introduces a Forest Fire Report Data Model intended to be a data reference model for sharing and exchanging forest fire reports in order to achieve interoperability among different organizations. This model is flexible and scalable enough to represent the needed data along the life cycle of a forest fire emergency (from the first alerts to the generation of response). Moreover, this data model has been developed to be a payload for EDXL-DE messages and it is being integrated in the Spanish National system to generate statistics of fire stations reports (ESA6).

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development

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Papers, Presentations and Demos

An optimization model for humanitarian relief volunteer management Falasca, Mauro., Fetter, Gary., Zobel, Christopher. Virginia Tech, United States of America

Exploring Development of Service-Oriented C2 Systems for Emergency Response Ingmarsson, Magnus. (1), Eriksson, Henrik. (1), Hallberg, Niklas. (2) 1: Linköpings Universitet, Sweden; 2: FOI Swedish Defence Research Agency Local emergency-response organizations must maximize their use of existing resources. Therefore, emergencyresponse organizations need appropriate commandand-control (C2) systems to coordinate not only their own resources, but also to take advantages of other local actors. The local nature of response coordination imposes additional challenges for the development of C2 systems. In particular, the C2 systems must support coordination across organizational boundaries at the local level. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) provide new technologies for the development of C2 systems. This approach is based on a set of loosely-coupled services offered by multiple actors rather than a single monolithic system. This work reports the result of a prototype SOA implementation that builds on a previous requirements engineering study for service-oriented C2 systems for local emergency response. The results illustrate how it is possible to develop lightweight C2 systems using stateor-the art Web and SOA technologies. However, there are still remaining organizational and maintainability challenges. Reconsidering information management roles and capabilities in disaster response decision-making units Bharosa, Nitesh., Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands When disaster strikes, the complex task environment requires multiple relief agencies to transform from centralized mono-disciplinary organizations into decentralized multidisciplinary decision-making unites. The result is the emergence of a complex, dynamic and interdependent architecture for information management. Evaluation studies reveal that often the collective information architecture did not sufficiently adapt to the changing task environment. Consequently, relief workers were often faced with information of poor quality, indicating information was incorrect, outdated or even unavailable to them. Accordingly, this paper sets out to identify and confirm main roles and capabilities necessary for adaptive information management in decision-making units. Based on two coordination theory principles, advance structuring and dynamic adjustment, we propose a set of information management roles and capabilities, which are confirmed using field research. We found that in current practice, information management is not considered to be a full time process requiring multiple, dedicated roles and capabilities.

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14:00 - 15:30 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Break-Out

Session: Practitioners Workshop Chairs: Jiri Trnka. Linköping University, Sweden Margit Kristensen, Alexandra Institute. Denmark Room: ISCRAM-4 ISCRAM 2009 has the conference theme boundary spanning initiatives and new perspectives. For this workshop we are looking forward to meet practitioners working at various positions in the domain of crisis and emergency management to join a brief activity on “collaboration between research and practice”. The aim is to provide a forum where we can discuss how to improve cooperation between practitioners and researchers in future research projects. The results of this session will be very valuable in the ISCRAM-community´s efforts of strengthening collaboration between practice and research and as a starting point for some exciting activities during ISCRAM 2010.

Track: Human-Computer Interaction

Session: Interactive Map Technologies Chairs: Brian Tomaszewski, Rochester Institute of Technology. USA Niklas Hallberg, Swedish Defence Research Agency. Sweden Room: ISCRAM-1 Early flood detection and mapping for humanitarian response De Groeve, Tom., Riva, Patrick. Joint Research Center of the European Commission, Italy The Global Flood Detection System, developed by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, aims at detecting major floods globally in a systematic, timely and impartial way appropriate for humanitarian response. A new processing technique for passive microwave satellite data results in more accurate results and global coverage. Compared to the previous sitebased technique (available now for 7500 observation sites), the new methodology is grid-based and has full coverage of the Earths surface. In any arbitrary 10x10km area (or pixel), brightness temperature at 36.5GHz (which is strongly correlated with surface water) is recorded and is calibrated in order to remove non-flood related influences. This results in a flood signal time series for each pixel, of which anomalies are well correlated with flood events. Because of its full coverage, the gridbased technique also allows the automatic creation of low-resolution flood maps only hours after the satellite passes, independent of cloud coverage.

Developments in information and communication technology (ICT) has adjusted the opportunities for spatial and temporal representations of data, possibly permitting the simultaneous visualization of how different regions and populations are affected during large-scale emergencies and crises. We surveyed 13 crisis-related mashups to derive some high-level design directions to guide the design and testing of next generation crisis support tools. The current web mashups offer a new way of looking at how crises are spatiotemporally ordered. However, since all technology is constrained by limitations of design choice, examining the limits and possibilities of what current design choices afford can inform attributes of what next generation crisis support tools would require. An Indoor Positioning System for Improved Action Force Command and Disaster Management Walder, Ulrich Bernoulli, Thomas., Glanzer, Gerald., Schuetz, Ruediger., Wiessflecker, Thomas. Graz University of Technology, Austria Managing emergency situations in large buildings and underground structures could be simplified if at any time the positions of on-site emergency crews were available. In this paper a system is proposed which combines inertial measurements of moving persons with building floor plans tagged with information on semantics to achieve a novel level of robust indoor positioning. A speech driven user interface tailored for visualization on head mounted displays makes information easily available for action forces. The system is complemented with a self-configurating communication network based on novel approaches combining mobile ad hoc networks, sensor networks, and professional mobile radio systems to make the locally determined positions available to anybody on-site.

Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations Session: IT for Crisis Management in Africa Chair: Willem Muhren, Tilburg University. The Netherlands Room: ISCRAM-2

IT Infrastructure Enabling Open Access for Flood Risk Preparedness in South Africa van Zyl, Terence Lesley., Cwele, Bheki Agrippa., Moodley, Deshendran., Parbhoo, Chetna., Shabangu, Petrus Sipho., Umuhoza, Denise. The Meraka Institute, South Africa

of risk relating to floods in South Africa. It may be argued that in the context of developing countries, flood preparedness is more valuable than the actual response to a flood disaster. The paper looks at this flood preparedness in the context of informal and semi-formal settlements. An information technology infrastructure is proposed that will allow decision makers to be alerted to possible flood high risk areas, and in so doing maximise preparedness. The Southern African Advanced Fire Information System McFerren, Graeme Andrew., Frost, Philip. Meraka Institute, South Africa This paper concerns the development of the South African Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS). We describe a use case of wildfires causing electricity transmission lines to be adversely affected. This use case provided the rationale for investment into a system for detecting and monitoring wildfires. The functionality of AFIS is described and we quantify its user acceptance and benefits before discussing our ongoing research and implementation efforts that will allow AFIS to become a standards- compliant, service-oriented system that serves the original use case but that could also be redeployed or re-used by other organisations for similar or alternative purposes. We end with a view of future work that will potentially allow AFIS to reach a wider audience of users. AÏDA – Providing a framework for objective assessment of ICT for Disaster Risk Management in Africa Kerle, Norman., ITC, The Netherlands As part of its recently renewed interest in Africa, the European Commission has funded the 2-year project _A_ DA - Advancing ICT for DRM in Africa_. A_DA is primarily an inventory of the ICT situation in Africa _ at continental, regional and national scales _ to be used as guidance for European funding in R&D and capacity building in Africa. The first project objective was the development of a conceptual framework for the assessment of ICT for DRM, to serve as the basis for the in-depth regional and detailed studies in 4 countries. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the structure of this CF and its principal findings. By evaluating existing ICT achievements that are or can be applied towards DRM, but also limitations and bottlenecks, the CF can also guide governmental or non-governmental agencies focusing on DRM in Africa, as well as to target research efforts.

The paper focuses on the information technology infrastructure required for the evaluation and monitoring ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 29

Papers, Presentations and Demos

Spatiotemporal Mashups: A Survey of Current Tools to Inform Next Generation Crisis Support Liu, Sophia., Palen, Leysia. ConnectivIT Lab, University of Colorado at Boulder, United States of America

Track: Standardization and Ontologies Session: Interoperability Chair: Frédérick Bénaben, Mines Albi - Université Toulouse. France Room: ISCRAM-3

Collaborative process design for Mediation Information System Engineering Truptil, Sébastien., Benaben, Frederick., Pingaud, Herve. Université de Toulouse - Ecole des Mines d’AlbiCarmaux, France To reduce a crisis, heterogeneous actors must coordinate their actions and exchange information. The ISyCri project aims at facilitating this collaboration by providing a mediation information system (MIS), which change the set of partners into a system of systems. The design of this MIS is based on the characterization of the crisis and services of actors. The first step of MIS design consists in deducing a collaborative process involving partners of the crisis reduction (from the characterization of the crisis and services of actors). This step is based on a metamodel, which allows to build models (consistent with each other) and ontologies. The inference of the collaborative process is not a trivial issue : the deducing approach uses ontologies and models transformation to organize services according to characteristics of the crisis. This paper discuss this global approach and an illustrative case of study. Using Architectures for Semantic Interoperability to Create Journal Clubs for Emergency Response Powell, James E., Collins, Linn Marks., Martinez, Mark L. B. Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA In certain types of _slow burn_ emergencies, careful accumulation and evaluation of information can offer a crucial advantage. The SARS outbreak in the first decade of the 21st century was such an event, and ad hoc journal clubs played a critical role in assisting scientific and technical responders in identifying and developing various strategies for halting what could have become a dangerous pandemic. This paper describes a process for leveraging emerging semantic web and digital library architectures and standards to (1) create a focused collection of bibliographic metadata, (2) extract semantic information, (3) convert it to the Resource Description Framework /Extensible Markup Language (RDF/XML), and (4) integrate it so that scientific and technical responders can share and explore critical information in the collections. Information Management for Crisis Response in WORKPAD Vetere, Guido. (1), Faraotti, Alessandro. (1), Poggi, Antonella. (2), Salvatore, Berardino. (1) 1: IBM, Italy; 2: University of Rome, “La Sapienza”

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WORKPAD (EU STREP project FP6-2005-IST-5034749) is an experimental platform for Crisis Response which adopts a decentralized, event-driven approach to overcome problems and limitations of centralized systems. The flexibility of P2P networking is relevant when different organizations must get rapidly integrated the one another, without resorting on standardized ontologies and centralized middleware components. This paper illustrates the main features of the Information Integration platform we have designed. A number of relevant technical and theoretical issues related to decentralized platforms are discussed in the light of specific needs of Crisis Response.

16:00 - 17:30 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Human-Computer Interaction

Session: HCI Design & Requirements Chairs: Alessio Malizia, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Spain Benedikt Birkhäuser, University of Paderborn. Germany Marco Plaß, University of Paderborn. Germany Room: ISCRAM-1 User Acceptance of Community Emergency Alert Technology: A Case Study Wu, Philip Fei, University of Surrey, United Kingdom The purpose of the study is to investigate the factors affecting the user acceptance of emergency alert systems. By studying the adoption of a SMS-based alert system at a large public university in the United States, this paper explores the research question: How are different motivational factors related to the intention and behavior of using emergency alert technology? Through a mixed-methods approach, the study demonstrates a _ deepening_ effort in applying the technology acceptance model (TAM) to emergency response system, drawing attention to the holistic nature of motivation-behavior in technology acceptance. Results of this research show that: the concept of usefulness has multiple levels of meanings to its intended users; the ease of use is more about the users_ ability to control the system behaviour; and subjective norm need to be examined with relation to its originating source. Mega-Collaboration: The Inspiration and Development of an Interface for Large-Scale Disaster Response Newlon, Christine M. (1), de Vreede, Gert-Jan. (2), MacDorman, Karl. (1), Patel, Himalaya. (1), Pfaff, Mark. (1), 1: Indiana University, United States of America; 2: University of Nebraska at Omaha, United States of

Designing for Firefighters — Building Empathy through Live Action RolePlaying Denef, Sebastian. (1), Dyrks, Tobias. (1), Meyer, Daniel. (2), Penkert, Berthold. (2), Ramirez, Leonardo. (1,3) 1: Fraunhofer FIT, Germany; 2: Institut der Feuerwehr NRW, Germany; 3: Universität Siegen, Germany In this paper we present role-playing workshop in a firefighting scenario conducted within the frame of a multidisciplinary consortium. Our work focuses on developing a navigation ubicomp infrastructure leveraging the cognitive skills of firefighters. Technology for navigation must understand existing navigation practices in order to provide adequate support. To deal with the complexity of this process, we use a participatory design approach based on a strong synergy among partners. We argue that a key aspect for the creation of this synergy is the construction of a bond of empathy allowing technology experts to understand the needs of the users of technology and also allowing firefighters to understand the role and activities of technology developers in the process. We present an account of the workshop conducted and some insights of the role that this method can play for complex, multidisciplinary teams working on developing safety-critical technology.

Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations Session: Rapid Information Dissemination Chair: Ingo Simonis, Geospatial Research & Consulting. Germany Room: ISCRAM-2

Towards an IP-Based Alert Message Delivery System Soini, Jari Olavi., Jaakkola, Hannu., Lepp_niemi, Jari., Rantanen, Petri., Saari, Mika., Sillberg, Pekka. Tampere University of technology, Finland

Advancements in technology have provided new opportunities for the delivery of emergency messages. However, some of the issues concerning data security and technical solutions are quite different from the problems of the traditional means of communication. The Internet poses its own set of challenges. This paper presents a few emergency messaging system proposals made by other researchers and also introduces a new proposition put forward by the authors of this paper. This will demonstrate how to use client-server architecture to deliver emergency alert messages in IP-based networks. The proposed system uses Atom feeds to deliver alert messages and also provides a feedback channel for client data. In this scenario clients could have any kind of device from mobile terminals to desktop computers. Geographically Visualizing Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP) Information Tomaszewski, Brian. (1), Czárán, Lóránt. (2) 1: Rochester Institute of Technology, USA; 2: (UN-SPIDER), United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), Germany Maps are essential visual advocacy devices for humanitarian relief projects. Maps provide advocacy by presenting, disseminating, and analyzing humanitarian relief project information in formats that are easier to understand and reason with. In this paper, we present our preliminary work on geographically visualizing Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP) information. The practical intent of our work is to (a) provide advocacy for CAP projects by geographically representing project information such as funding status so that (b) the nature of a project is better understood, thus potentially leading to increased project donations and improved project funding decision making. We provide examples of a prototype mapping application built to utilize Google Earth_ for representing CAP project information in mapbased formats. Rapid Geo-Image Communications for Disaster Management Skinnemoen, Harald. (1), Bjorgo, Einar. (2), Hall, Richard. (3) 1: AnsuR Technolgies AS, Norway; 2: Unosat/Unitar; 3: Kongsberg Satelite, Norway Rapid communication of visual and geographical information to and from disaster areas where communications channels are limited is a fundamental challenge. Satellite communications is the only reliable technology for field teams who need to communicate images, data and reports. Updated satellite earth-observation imagery is necessary, and coordinated information distributed to many field teams simultaneously. Slow and expensive satellite links, compared to other communications, require special solutions. AnsuR, UNOSAT and KSAT have developed ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 31

Papers, Presentations and Demos

America The need to gather and use decentralized information and resources in responding to disasters calls for an interface that can support large-scale collaborative efforts. This paper describes a project to create such an interface. This collaboration tool will go beyond existing groupware and social networking tools, providing easy entry, categorization, and visualization of large amounts of critical data; the ability to form ad-hoc teams with collaboration protocols for negotiated action; and agentaugmented tracking and coordination of these activities. The paper covers the inspiration and development process for this tool, discussing the findings of preliminary testing, which indicate the importance of the data entry interface, the impact of emergent leadership, and the value of a directed negotiation process. The paper also discusses future planned enhancements, including formalized collaboration engineering and the use of a disaster simulation test bed.

and demonstrated (@TRIPLEX2008) a novel integrated disaster management system. Geo-tagged field photos are sent using ASIGN to operation centers and integrated with near real-time earth observation data, maps and GIS servers within a minute after capture anywhere worldwide. Rapid mapping is conducted and maps with embedded photos tagged to locations are distributed to field user. Further, novel on-line rapid mapping tools have been developed for geo-tagged image integration with GIDS/GMES data downloaded from high latitude KSAT operated ground-stations.

Track: Research Methods

Session: Analysis, Testing & Evaluation Chairs: David Mendonca, New Jersey Institute of Technology. USA Raj Sharman, University at Buffalo, USA Room: ISCRAM-3 GDIA: a Cognitive Task Analysis Protocol to Capture the Information Requirements of Emergency First Responders Rahubadde Kankanamge, Raj Prasanna., King, Malcolm., Yang, Lili. Loughborough University, United Kingdom As a partial requirement of the development of an information system for the UK fire and rescue services, this paper describes the development and application of a protocol capable of capturing the information requirements of fire and rescue first responders. After evaluating the existing techniques commonly used in difficult decision-making environments, a Goal Directed Information Analysis (GDIA) protocol is proposed. The clearly defined, repeatable steps of GDIA make it a requirements-gathering protocol which can be easily administered by an investigator without any prior knowledge or experience of the tool. This makes GDIA one of the very few information requirements-gathering protocols capable of capturing the requirements of the emergency-related domains. This paper further elaborates an example of its application to capture the information requirements of the first responders of UK fire and rescue services. A Principled Method of Scenario Design for Testing Emergency Response Decision-Making Drury, Jill L. (1), Klein, Gary L. (1), More, Loretta. (2), Pfaff, Mark. (3), 1: The MITRE Corporation, USA; 2: The Pennsylvania State University, USA; 3: Indiana University Indianapolis, USA We are investigating decision aids that present potential courses of action available to emergency responders. To determine whether these aids improve decision quality, however, we first needed to develop test scenarios that were challenging in well-understood ways to ensure that we have tested under the full breadth of representative

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decision-making situations. We devised a three-step method of developing scenarios: define the decision space, determine the cost components of each decision’s potential consequences based on the principles of Robust Decision Making, then choose conflicting pairs of cost components (e.g., a small fire, implying low property damage, in a densely inhabited area, which implies high personal injury). In an experiment to validate this approach, participants made decisions faster in nonambiguous (control) cases as opposed to cases that included this principled introduction of ambiguity. Our principled ambiguity method of scenario design is also appropriate for use in other domains as long as they can be analyzed in terms of costs of decision alternatives. Evaluating the Impact of Improvisation on the Incident Command System: A Modified Single Case Study using the DDD Simulator Franco, Zeno. (1), Beutler, Larry E. (1), Blau, Kathy. (1), Holman, John. (1), Zumel, Nina. (2), 1: Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, USA; 2: Quimba Software, USA This study attempts to systematically evaluate the utility of the Incident Command System (ICS) in varying disaster contexts. While ICS is mandated in the United States, recent studies suggest it may be ineffective in emergency events that violate its assumptions. A military team-in-the-loop simulator was customized to represent the problems, assets, and command structures found in civilian led disaster management teams. Drawing extensively from behavioural research paradigms in psychology, a modified single case design was used to explore possible casual relationships between improvisation and performance in conditions that both supported and violated ICS assumptions. Further, psychological factors that may play a role in improvisational action were explored. In addition to some preliminary empirical findings, the successes and difficulties encountered in adapting the DDD command and control simulator are briefly discussed as part of an effort to achieved greater interdisciplinary integration.

08:45 - 09:00 PLENARY 09:00 - 10:00 KEYNOTE

Prof Martha Grabowski (LeMoyne College) Highly Reliable Crisis and Disaster Systems

Martha Grabowski is Professor and Director of the Information Systems program in the Business Department at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York, and Research Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Professor Grabowski is Vice Chair of the U.S. National Academies’ Ocean Studies Board committee assessing the United States’ tsunami preparedness; she is also the past Chair of the National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board (TRB)/Marine Board, a member of the TRB Executive Board, and a member of the American Bureau of Shipping.

10:30 - 12:00 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Collaboration and Social Networking

Session: Decision-Making Chairs: Björn Johansson, SAAB Group, Sweden Peter Berggren, Swedish Defence Research Agency, Sweden Room: ISCRAM-1 Martha Grabowski LeMoyne College Crisis and disaster systems share a number of daunting requirements. First, they must help people maintain awareness of cues that warn of both rare and recurring events; they must monitor the environment constantly; they must provide sophisticated forecast and analysis nearly instantaneously and on demand; and when events occur, they must provide clear and timely warnings and decision-making guidance to very different constituencies, including unsuspecting members of the public and trained disaster and emergency managers. After an event, they must provide post-event monitoring, assessment and analysis as well as information to the evacuated and those managing the evacuation about when it is safe to return; and in a perfect world, they would provide the keys to organizational learning, feedback and improvement. Meeting these requirements is a tall order for events that occur with some frequency, such as hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, debilitating snow and ice storms, and floods; they are even more challenging for infrequent and highly variable catastrophic hazards such as large-scale sandstorms or tsunamis. In all cases, however, the distributed systems and people that comprise disaster planning, notification, response and mitigation must be integrated, collaborative and highly reliable. In this talk, we present a vision of highly reliable crisis and disaster systems that draws on work in organizational theory, learning organizations and resilient systems, and discuss challenges associated with that vision in an era of dwindling resources, increasing system complexity, and societal transformations.

Group Decision-Making Method in the field of Coal Mine Safety Management Based on AHP with Clustering Song, Yan., Hu, Yinghui. Harbin Engineering University, Peoples Republic of China The complex and changeful system of coal mine increases the difficulty and importance of its decisionmaking. Individual decisions sometimes can not bring satisfactory outcomes since the decision need broad knowledge and experience which is not in single field but related to many domains of economics, sociology, logic, etc. To improve the validity and objectivity of decisionmaking, the group decision-making method is feasible and necessary since it can collect more intelligence to choose and judge together. This paper synthetically analyzes the content and characteristic of decisionmaking in the field of coal mine safety. A methodology for group decision-making using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with cluster analysis is proposed accordingly. Then a case study using the method indicates that it is effective and helpful to improve the level of decision-making in the field of coal mine safety management in China.

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Papers, Presentations and Demos

TUESDAY 12th

Crisis Decision Making Through a Shared Integrative Negotiation Mental Model van Santen, Willem. (1), Jonker, Catholijn. (2), Wijngaards, Niek. (3) 1: Be Wind B.V., The Netherlands; 2: TU Delft, The Netherlands; 3: D-CIS lab, The Netherlands Decision making during crises mostly takes place in (multi-agency) teams, in a bureaucratic political context. As a result, the common notion that during crises decision-making should be done in line with a Command & Control structure is invalid. This paper shows that the best way for crisis decision-making teams in a bureaucratic political context is to follow an integrative negotiation approach as the shared mental model of decision-making. This conclusion is based on a careful analysis of crisis decision-making by teams in a bureaucratic political context. First of all this explains why in a bureaucratic political context the Command & Control adage does not hold. Secondly, this paper motivates why crisis decision making in such context can be seen as a negotiation process. Further analysis of the given context shows that an assertive and cooperative approach suits crisis decision making best. Towards hybrid rational-naturalistic decision support for Command & Control Grant, Tim., Netherlands Defence Academy, The Netherlands Information systems for crisis response and management, including military Command & Control systems, are designed to support their users_ decisionmaking processes. Decision-making can be rational or naturalistic. Psychologists have shown that experienced decision makers under time pressure prefer using naturalistic methods. Case studies of military doctrine and four implemented Command & Control systems show that most decision support assumes rational decisionmaking. Some support for naturalistic decision-making is becoming available. We identify a hybrid mix of rational and naturalistic decision support tools as being desirable for flexible Command & Control.

Track: Human-Computer Interaction

Session: Crisis Communication Chairs: Jens Pottebaum, University of Paderborn. Germany Jobst Löffler, Fraunhofer IAIS. Germany Room: ISCRAM-2 CAP-ONES: An Emergency Notification System for all Malizia, Alessio., Acuna, Pablo., Aedo, Ignacio., Diaz, Paloma., Onorati, Teresa. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain In this paper we present an ontology-based system for managing emergency alert notifications. Our purpose is to generate emergency alerts that are accessible to different kinds of people, paying special attention 34 - www.iscram.org

to more vulnerable collectives like impaired people. By adapting alerts to different devices and users we can allow Emergency Management Systems (EMS) to communicate with collectives like blind or deaf people whom otherwise will be unreachable by usual channels. Moreover, if we consider the constrains imposed by the nature of the emergency situations we can also improve the information transmission to cope with situational disabilities (e.g. smoke during a fire can cause low vision problems). We centered our system architecture on two characteristics: the first one is an ontology that codifies knowledge about accessibility, devices, disabilities, emergencies and media so the alert notification can be tailored according to different parameters; the second one is the use of an open standard like the CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) that enables our system to interoperate with other existing systems. Computer Supported Collaborative Training in Crisis Communication Management Reuter, Christian., Muller, Claudia., Pipek, Volkmar. University of Siegen, Germany Crisis management requires stakeholders to not only show strategic, organisational preparedness for crisis events (e.g. by systematising and professionalizing coping work), but also to develop skills to deal with unanticipated events and other stakeholders involved in the same crisis. They should not only rely on established information flows and behaviour patterns, but should be able to deal with situational aspects. This usually involves communication work within and between organisations involved in crisis management. The skill of crisis communication needs to be practiced. We describe the practice of the crisis communication training of a German electricity provider and the prototype we developed, implemented and evaluated. The collaborative training tool that targets not only the local practice, but aims at inter-organisational trainings that would also allow to improve the mutual understanding for communication practices and information needs of other stakeholders. Towards a Distributed Crisis Response Communication System Bradler, Dirk., Aitenbichler, Erwin., Liebau, Nicolas., Schiller, Benjamin. TU Darmstadt, Germany Reliable communication systems are one of the key success factors for a successful first response mission. Current crisis response communication systems suffer from damaged or destroyed infrastructure or are just overstressed in the case of a large scale disaster. We provide an outline for a distributed communication approach, which fulfills the requirements of first responders. It is based on a layered network topology and current technology used in research projects or already established products. In addition we propose a testing framework for the evaluation of a crisis response communication system.

Session: Computing Situation Awareness Chair: Leon Rothkrantz, TU Delft. The Netherlands Room: ISCRAM-3 Computed Ontology-based Situation Awareness of Multi-User Observations Fitrianie, Siska., Rothkrantz, Leon J.M. Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands In recent years, we have developed a framework of human-computer interaction that offers recognition of various communication modalities including speech, lip movement, facial expression, handwriting and drawing, body gesture, text and visual symbols. The framework allows the rapid construction of a multimodal, multidevices, and multi-user communication system within crisis management. This paper reports the approaches used in multi-user information integration and multimodal presentation modules, which can be used in isolation, but also as part of the framework. The latter is able to specify and produce context-sensitive and user-tailored output combining language, speech, visual-language and graphics. These modules provide a communication channel between the system and users with different communication devices. By the employment of ontology, the systems view about the world is constructed from multi-user observations and appropriate multimodal responses are generated. An Emergency Response Model Toward Situational Awareness Improvement Sapateiro, Cláudio. (1), Antunes, Pedro. (2) 1: High School of Technology, Portugal; 2: University of Lisbon, Portugal When facing emergency scenarios contingent factors may strongly condition pre-defined response procedures. The proposed approach takes the perspective that an emergency response model should serve as functional tool guiding the response effort. The presented conceptual model is grounded on existing situation awareness models and it’s proposed usage dynamics considers the research work regarding High Reliability Organizations. The presented model structures the emergency management process in a set of dimensions that should be collaboratively correlated by involved participants in order to mitigate the disruptive situation progression. An instantiation of the proposed model is made focusing on IT service desk teams support when addressing emergency incidents that may compromise business continuity.

of what is going on (computational awareness). The assumption is that the crisis area has been covered by multiple cameras and cars with mobile cameras. The cameras sense the environment and extract some features. One of the main features is the amount of motion. Those features are the input of Bayesian network together with nodes corresponding to states/ situations such as terroristic attack, fires, bomb explosion etc. Given some probabilistic values of the observed features, by reasoning probabilistic values of the possible situations can be computed. The application domain is a railway stations and its environment. Forty scenarios are performed by actors. From the video recordings the conditional probabilities have been computed. The scenarios are designed as scripts. Scripting proved to be a good methodology to design crisis situations and decision models. A prototype has been developed and tested with the recordings of the forty scenes. The models, experiments and results will be presented in the paper.

Track: Break-out

Session: CityLabs / Living Labs approaches and initiatives Chair: Susanne Jul, Amaryllis Consulting. USA Room: ISCRAM-4 This session present and discuss the concept of City Labs. A City Lab is an initiative formed according the popular and attractive principles originating from Living Labs. In this session we will use the City Lab in Tilburg as inspiration in order to talk about, discuss and contrast to similar approaches done in Gothenburg. City Lab is an attractive format for multi-stakeholder projects and we anticipate that similar labs will be organized in many European cities. Participants in this session will get inspiration on how public organizations, industry and academia could collaborate to promote grass-root level actions and policy level changes. The Tilburg CityLab Paul Burghardt, DECIS, The Netherlands LivingLab activities in Gothenburg Bo Norrhem, Security Arena, Lindholmen Science Park

12:00 - 14:00 DEMOS AND LUNCH

Crowd control by multiple cameras Rothkrantz, Leon J.M., Yang, Zhenke. Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Hands-On Demo Session

At Delft University of Technology is a project running on crowd control. The goal of the project is detecting and tracking of people during a crisis event, classification of the behaviour of people and finally the assessment

Chairs: Sofie Pilemalm, Swedish Defence Research Agency, Sweden Dennis Andersson, Swedish Defence Research Agency, Sweden Room: ISCRAM Lunch Venue ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 35

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Track: Open Track

14:30 - 16:00 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Collaboration and Social Networking

Session: Designing for Collaboration Chairs: Leysia Palen, University of Colorado, Boulder. USA Star Roxanne Hiltz, New Jersey Institute of Technology. USA Room: ISCRAM-1 Designing Collario for Continuous Reviewing and Practicing of Emergency Plans to Ensure Complex System Safety Yao, Xiang., Chumer, Michael., Turoff, Murray. New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA In the 21st century, rapid changes of the society exert new requirements on Emergency Preparedness. Under such a dynamic environment, emergency plans have to be reviewed and practiced continuously to catch up with the changing conditions. Face-to-face (FtF) interactions to make emergency plans and train responders seem insufficient. Virtual team, a new team form allowing dynamic recruitment of experts from global extent and conduction of teamwork whenever it is needed, provides a feasible solution. However, without executable programs and the support of effective group support systems, virtual teams for this purpose wont be working productively. This paper discusses how to design an effective group support system for a domain-specific application and introduces the design details about Collario (Collaborative Scenario) that facilitates collaborative scenario creation in virtual teams and utilizes scenario as the vehicle to review and practice emergency plans on a continuous basis. Preliminary system demonstrations and interviews with emergency management professionals find that Collario is easy to use and has the potential to be very useful for various emergency preparedness purposes, such as creating Master Scenario Event List (MSEL), conducting on-line Table Top eXercises (TTX), and sharing personal emergency management experiences.

from a study on how mobile live video capabilities could improve information sharing and situation awareness in emergency response work. Hastily Formed Networks for Disaster Response: Technical Heterogeneity and Virtual Pockets of Local Order Sigholm, Johan. (1), Nadjm-Tehrani, Simin. (2), Törnqvist, Eva. (2) 1: Swedish National Defence College, Sweden; 2: Linköping University, Sweden As natural and man-made disasters become increasingly common, ensuring effective disaster response, mitigation and recovery is growing into a high-priority task for governments and administrations globally. This paper describes the challenges of collaboration within multiorganisational hastily formed networks for post-disaster response, which are increasingly relying on emerging ICT infrastructures for communication and cooperation. We present an interdisciplinary analysis of the conditions for establishing an effective mutual conversation space for involved stakeholders, and how the development of sociotechnological systems affects cognitive and behavioural aspects such as established communities of practice and virtual pockets of local order. Our observations thus far suggest that some of the key issues are overcoming organisational and cultural heterogeneity, and finding solutions for technical interoperability, to ensure effective, pervasive and sustainable information exchange within and between organisations participating in hastily formed networks.

Track: Intelligent Systems

Session: Knowledge, Training Environments Chair: Narjès Bellamine-Ben Saoud, RIADI-GDL Laboratory. Tunisia Room: ISCRAM-2

and

Smart

Information Sharing Using Live Video in Emergency Response Work Bergstrand, Fredrik., Landgren, Jonas. Viktoria Institute, Sweden

OpenKnowledge at work: exploring centralized and decentralized information gathering in emergency contexts Marchese, Maurizio. (1), Besana, Paolo. (2), Rizzi, Veronica. (1), Trecarichi, Gaia. (1) ,Vaccari, Lorenzino. (1) 1: University of Trento, DISI, Italy; 2: University of Edinburgh, CISA, UK

This paper presents findings from a design-oriented study focusing on emergency response work. Traditionally, information technology for emergency response work has included enroute navigation advice, resource management, hazard material databases, property information repositories, and situation reporting using sketching functionality. Now, a new class of information technology has become available, namely mobile live video capabilities. This paper presents initial findings

Real-world experience teaches us that to manage emergencies, efficient crisis response coordination is crucial; ICT infrastructures are effective in supporting the people involved in such contexts, by supporting effective ways of interaction. They also should provide innovative means of communication and information management. At present, centralized architectures are mostly used for this purpose; however, alternative infrastructures based on the use of distributed information sources,

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Self-Organizing Resource Network for Traffic Accident Response Levashova, Tatiana., Kashevnik, Alexey., Krizhanovsky, Andrew., Shilov, Nikolay., Smirnov, Alexander. St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Federation Traffic accidents are a common feature of the modern life. The paper proposes an approach addressing response to traffic accidents happened in a smart environment. The idea behind the approach is to self-organize resources of the environment according to the state of the situation caused by the accident. The resources self-organize a collaborative network that comprises physical devices, software services, organizations, and persons. The purpose of the resources is to take joint actions in accident response. The disaster response system intended for operating in smart environments has a service oriented architecture. Some of Web-services making up the architecture are intended to modelling the accident situations. Others model resource functionalities or bear supporting functions. Web-services which model resource functionalities are aligned against the disaster management ontology. This alignment ensures semantic interoperability of the heterogeneous resources. The alignment operation is supported by a tool that using a machine-readable dictionary identifies similar concepts in the ontology and Web-service descriptions. Response to the traffic accident illustrates main ideas described in the paper. Crisis response simulation combining discrete-event and agent-based modeling Gonzalez, Rafael A. Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

integration and separation of both models allows for independent modifications of the response organization and the scenario, resulting in a testbed that allows testing different organizations to respond to the same scenario or different emergencies for the same organization. It also provides a high-level architecture suggesting the way in which DES and MAS based models can be combined into a single simulation in a simple way.

Track: Research Methods

Session: Ethnography and Field Reports Chair: Jiri Trnka, Linköping University. Sweden Margit Kristensen, Alexandra Institute. Denmark Room: ISCRAM-3 Red, white and blue with a little bit of green: an ethnographic study into the Emergency Response Rooms in the City of Amsterdam Boersma, Kees., Groenewegen, Peter., Wagenaar, Pieter. VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands During the last decades there has been a lot of attention to issues of urban safety, emergency response and crisis management. Emergency response rooms located in urban regions are interesting public sector organizational arrangements to be considered in this respect. In our paper we pay attention to emergency response rooms (911, in Europe: 112) in the Netherlands and especially in Amsterdam. Using an ethnographic approach, we studied the fire brigades (red), the medical services (white) and the police (blue) including, respectively, their back-office organizations, their identities and habits, and how they work together. As could be predicted, the (technical) integration of emergency response systems in the Netherlands was not an unproblematic matter. Yet, it is not so much the technology, as well as the institutional arrangements that are at stake. In our contribution we will make clear that the organization of the safety response in Amsterdam is rather fragmented. Our study shows a potential threat: the subunits (red, white and blue) can become too fragmentated and de-coupled because of a loss of a collective objective and understanding. The latest discussion in the field is about the introduction of net-centric work, - a concept from the military (green) based upon the interactive internet 2.0 technology.

This paper presents an architecture combining a discreteevent simulation (DES) environment for a crisis situation with an agent-based model of the response organization. In multi-agent systems (MAS) as a computational organization, agents are modeled and implemented separately from the environmental model. We follow this perspective by submitting an architecture in which the environment follows a DES approach, and the agents are modeled following a MAS approach. The simultaneous ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 37

Papers, Presentations and Demos

are currently being explored, studied and analyzed. This paper aims at investigating the capability of a novel approach (developed within the European project OpenKnowledge) to support centralized as well as decentralized architectures for information gathering. For this purpose we developed an agent-based e-Response simulation environment fully integrated with the OpenKnowledge infrastructure and through which existing emergency plans are modelled and simulated. Preliminary results show the OpenKnowledge capability of supporting the two afore-mentioned architectures and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases.

Socio-spatial implications of converging physical and digital infrastructures for crisis management: Ethnography of two service technician working environments of a power provider company Müller, Claudia., Pipek, Volkmar. University of Siegen, Germany The basis of this article is an ethnographical study conducted in a German electricity provider company. The energy supply sector is an important domain in the field of emergency management research as it is as infrastructure provider often affected in the realm of various crisis scenarios. There exist many dependencies and interrelations between power infrastructure providers and authorities and corporations in cases of emergency. Underrepresented in recent research is the power supply domain in general and especially service and maintenance work on infrastructures. The paper focuses this special division of the company service workers in two different regions, one department located in a major German city and the other in a rural area. The categories of convergence of physical and electronical working appliances and infrastructures and socio-spatially bound knowledge serve to understand and analyse the work practices of the service workers as preliminary investigations to system development. Sharing Knowledge: How to Highlight Proven Experience in the Swedish Armed Forces Pettersson, Ulrica., The Swedish Armed Forces Collage, Sweden Working with the reuse of knowledge is a widespread effort in many organizations, a common approach being to collect and make use of Experience. In the Swedish Armed Forces (SwAF), this activity is not handled in an organized way, as a methodological and systematic approach to handling Experience, transforming Experience into proven Experience and finally reusing it in the organization is lacking. This paper is concerned with practitioners_ efforts to share and reuse knowledge for the purpose of improving their professional competence, and should be viewed as research in progress, as no definitive results have yet been reached. The aim is to develop and provide a method for transforming Experience into proven Experience. A solution to this complicated problem could reduce repetition of mistakes and facilitate for of high-quality proven Experience, not just in SwAF but also in other organizations.

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Track: Break-out

Session: Boundary-Spanning Initiatives for Humanitarian Operations Chair: Ingo Simonis Room: ISCRAM-4 The IRMA-project The Integrated Risk Management for Africa (IRMA) initiative seeks to build a suitable reference platform for the management of natural and environmental risks on the African continent. This platform will allow stakeholders to develop and use tailored risk management models. Participants in this session will learn more about IRMA. The IMMAP organization Petri Nevalainen, iMMAP.org iMMAP is an organization that is promoting and developing new approaches for effective use of information management practices and principles in the service of humanitarian relief and development. The iMMAP team was formed in late-1998, leading the first internationally-coordinated effort to combine information management, sociology and Geographic Information System technology to define the scourge of landmines and explosive remnants of war and change the way their impact on society is measured. In this break-out session, we at iMMAP will present the work we do and how it could be related to other activities, organizations and communities within the domain of crisis response and management.

16:30 - 17:30 First General Assembly Meeting of the INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR CRISIS RESPONSE AND MANAGEMENT Bartel Van de Walle chairman of the ISCRAM Board AGENDA OF THE MEETING: 1. Presentation of the present Board of Directors 2. Approval of requested Association memberships 3. Short presentation on the House rules concerning the Board of Directors Election and Vote on these rules 4. Announcement of the set-up of the 2009 Election Committee 5. Election of the new Board of Directors 6. Further communications on the Association

08:45 - 09:00 PLENARY 08:45 - 09:00 Introduction of the Chinese Delegation Hui Zhang Professor, Center for Public Safety Research, Tsinghua University, China Weicheng Fan Director of the Center for Public Safety research, Tsinghua University, China

09:00 - 10:00 KEYNOTE

Katrin Verclas (MobileActive.org) Flood, Famine, and Mobile Phones

supply chain management. Zimbabwe’s diaspora living in Britain can go to a website called mukuru.com, order and pay for goods online—and have them delivered to family members back home with a code texted to a mobile phone to redeem the goods. We will discuss how mobiles are used in emergency and disaster response, supply-chain management and logistics, and what this means for aid organizations on the ground. Katrin Verclas is a recognized expert in mobile communications for social impact. She is the co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, a global network of practitioners using mobile phones for social impact. She is also a principal at Calder Strategies, focusing on mobile strategy, impact evaluation, effectiveness and ROI assessment, and interactive capacity building. Katrin has written widely on communication strategies and new media in citizen participation and civil society organizations, and for development. She is a coauthor of Wireless Technology for Social Change, a report on trends in mobile use by NGOs with the UN Foundation and Vodafone Group Foundation. She is a frequent speaker on communications and ITCs in civil society at national and international conferences, and has published numerous articles and publications on technology for social change in leading popular and industry publications.

10:30 - 12:00 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Collaboration and Social Networking Session: People and Social Media Chair: Linda Plotnick, New Jersey Institute of Technology. USA Room: ISCRAM-1

An Online Social Network For Emergency Management White, Connie., Hiltz, Starr Roxanne., Kushma, Jane., Plotnick, Linda., Turoff, Murray. New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA Katrin Verclas Co-founder MobileActive.org Mobile Technology is transforming humanitarian relief— and shifting the balance of power between donors and recipients. The number of mobile-phone subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa increased sevenfold between 2000 and 2006, India nearly doubled its mobile-phone subscriptions last year to 150 million subscribers with 500 million expected by 2010. According to recent reports, in several disasters victims surprised their benefactors by asking for money instead of medicine. Concern, a UK aid organization, responded by providing cash aid via mobile phone in Kenya. A new mobile application on the Google phone, Rapid Android, is used in Nigeria for large-scale

Online social networks (OSN) are fast becoming extremely popular and useful. They enable the establishment of global relationships that are domain related or based on some general need shared by the participants. Emergency domain related websites, each with their own stated mission, are becoming common, and are used by both private and public emergency-related organizations. Can a social network be the answer to bringing all of the emergency domain-related entities together as a one-stop shop? We propose to investigate whether the social network paradigm can be used to enable individuals and organizations to collaborate in mutually beneficial ways, in all stages of emergency management: mitigation, preparation, response and ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 39

Papers, Presentations and Demos

WEDNESDAY 13th

recovery. Emergency management students were surveyed to study the initial idea and its acceptance. The results showed overwhelming agreement that OSN should be considered a viable solution to the problems plaguing information and communications before, during, and after extreme events. Repairing Human Infrastructure in War Zones Mark, Gloria Janet., Al-Ani, Ban., Semaan, Bryan. University of California Irvine, USA Citizens in a society depend on human infrastructure for a range of activities in their daily lives, such as work and socializing. In this paper we consider three different intertwined types of infrastructures of a society that may be affected in crisis situations: the physical, technological, and human. We discuss how the human infrastructure is repaired during a catastrophe. We argue that when the human infrastructure is damaged, e.g. in a natural catastrophe or war, then people can switch reliance to the technological infrastructure to be resilient. We conducted an empirical study of 85 citizens who lived in war zones. We interviewed Israeli citizens who experienced the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon war and Iraqi citizens who lived in Iraq during the current Gulf war. In this paper, we report how information technology is used by our informants in new ways in their attempt to maintain social relationships and continue working. Our informants also used technology to to help navigate safe routes for travel and to support themselves psychologically. We discuss implications of our results for disaster research. Twitter Adoption and Use in Mass Convergence and Emergency Events Hughes, Amanda Lee, Palen, Leysia. University of Colorado at Boulder, USA This paper offers a descriptive account of Twitter (a microblogging service) across four high profile, mass convergence events_two emergency and two not. We examine how Twitter is being used surrounding these events, and compare and contrast how that behavior is different from more general Twitter use. Our findings suggest that Twitter messages sent during these types of events contain more displays of information broadcasting and brokerage, and we observe that general Twitter use seems to have evolved over time to offer more of an information-sharing purpose. We also provide convincing evidence that Twitter users who join during and in apparent relation to a mass convergence or emergency event are more likely to become long-term adopters of the technology.

Track: Humanitarian Actions and Operations

Session: Modeling of Humanitarian Operation Chair: Bartel van de Walle, Tilburg University. The Netherlands Room: ISCRAM-2 Learning from previous humanitarian operations, 40 - www.iscram.org

a Business Process Reengineering approach Charles, Aurelie., Lauras, Matthieu. Universite Toulouse - Mines Albi, France Uncertainty and risks are part of humanitarians_ daily routine. Most of the time, infrastructures are damaged or non-existent, the political climate is highly volatile, communication means are insufficient, and so on. Therefore, humanitarian organizations often have to find original methods to implement their supply chains. They may also face recurrent problems, that requires hem to change the way they operate. And yet, as they lack the time and resources to reflect on the lessons learnt, most of their best practices and issues are neither captured nor communicated. The aim of the study is thus to propose a framework to capitalize humanitarians_ knowledge and know-how, to analyze both gaps and best practices and learn from one operation to another. To this end, we propose a framework derived from traditional Enterprise Modelling tools, adapted to fit relief chains_ specificities. Field applications are then given to illustrate our approach and its beneficial effects. Using a Workflow Management System to Manage Emergency Plans Sell, Christian. (1), Braun, Iris. (2) 1: SAP Research CEC Dresden, Germany; 2: Technical University of Dresden, Germany In the event of a catastrophe in Germany a so-called executive staff is set up. In support of their work they refer to emergency plans, which describe the chronological order of a set of suitable measures for a dedicated event e.g. an evacuation. These plans only exist in the form of large printed documents. Hence, the technical support for executing emergency plans is very limited. In this paper we present a model for a workflow management system (WfMS) for supporting the modeling, execution and management of emergency plans before and during a catastrophe. It is based on the idea that emergency plans are similar to business processes and can therefore be modeled as workflows. In contrast to most traditional WfMS, the introduced approach supports unstructured activities and their delegation as well as the management of resources. Furthermore, we analyze drawbacks of the current process for catastrophe management using emergency plans and present a set of requirements on the WfMS which arise from the specific properties of an emergency plan. How Humanitarian Logistics Information Systems Can Improve Humanitarian Logistics: A View from the Field Howden, Michael., Humanitarian Consultant, New Zealand This paper draws on the author’s experience in working in humanitarian organizations to examine humanitarian logistics and supply chain management information systems which can be developed to improve them.

Track: Open Track

Session: Dependability and Vulnerability Chair: Frank Fiedrich, George Washington University. USA Room: ISCRAM-3 An Indicator Framework to Assess the Vulnerability of Industrial Sectors against Indirect Disaster Losses Merz, Mirjam. (1,2), Hiete, Michael. (1), 1: University of Karlsruhe, Germany; 2: Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology, Germany Natural and man-made hazards may affect industrial production sites by both direct and indirect losses. Indirect losses, e.g. from production downtimes, can exceed direct losses multiple times. Thus, the vulnerability of industrial sectors to indirect losses is an important component of risk and its determination is an important part within risk analysis. In this paper a conceptual indicator framework is presented which allows to assess the indirect vulnerability of industrial sectors to different types of disasters in a quantitative manner. The results are useful for information sharing and decision making in crisis management and emergency planning (e.g. mitigation measures, business continuity planning). Besides the identification and conceptual motivation of the indicators, methodical aspects such as standardization, weighting and aggregation are addressed. Dependability of IT Systems in Municipal Emergency Management Weyns, Kim., Martin Höst. Lund University, Sweden In recent years governmental actors have become more and more dependent on IT systems for their responsibilities in a crisis situation. To avoid unexpected problems with IT systems in the aftermath of a crisis it is important that such risks are identified and that measures can be taken to reduce the dependence on systems that could be unreliable. This paper describes two case studies exploring how Swedish municipalities incorporate IT systems in their emergency planning. The study focuses especially on how different actors within a municipality cooperate to analyse the risks of depending on IT systems in critical

situations. The study shows that today there is much room for improvement, especially in the communication between IT personnel and emergency managers. Finally, this paper describes the requirements for a process improvement framework that can assist governmental actors in analysing and improving their dependency on IT systems in emergency management. Capabilities of C2 Systems for Crisis Management in Local Communities Hallberg, Niklas., Erland Jungert. Swedish Defence Research Agency, Sweden Development of command and control (C2) systems for crisis management in local communities must be based on the needs of the crisis management actors as well as capabilities of information technology (IT). IT provides extensive possibilities, but is difficult to adapt to the users_ needs. A profound exploration of the needs of C2 systems for crisis management is often neglected. Hence, the management of major crisis has been held back because of the lack of useful tools. This paper presents an architecture for a C2 system for the local communities. The development of the architecture was based on a needs analysis, including interviews with crisis management at a local community level. The architecture is also based on novel design issues that have lead to the development of a conceptual model structure called the mission support model whose main concepts mainly include (1) user roles, (2) services and (3) views.

Track: Break-out

Session: ISCRAM-China & China Emergency Response System Chair: Song Yan, Harbin Engineering University. China Room: ISCRAM-4 This session is focused on the ongoing activities in China in the domain of IS/IT and crisis response and management. We are very happy for the large Chinese delegation participating at the ISCRAM2009-conference that in a sense is an important sign of the ISCRAM community´s ability grow and to promote boundaryspanning initiatives and new perspectives. The ISCRAM-China Conference Song Yan, Harbin Engineering University. China China Emergency Response System and Its Application on Sichuan Earthquake and Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Weicheng Fan, Director of the Center for Public Safety research (CPSR), China Standing Director of International Association for Fire Safety Science Hui Zhang, Professor, Center for Public Safety Research Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

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Humanitarian logistics is a diverse field, and is not fully represented by the supply chain management model. It is less defined than commercial logistics, and unlike in a commercial supply chain, the recipient of the aid does not participate in a commercial transaction giving the decision making ability to the donor funding the aid. Humanitarian logistics information systems need to be considered over the entire disaster management cycle, and not just during the disaster response phase. Information systems can also help to integrate logistics within humanitarian operations and create metrics for improving its performance. Humanitarian logistics information systems could also enable a number of long term improvements, such as increased detection of corruption, management of local markets and targeted corporate donations of supplies.

14:00 - 15:30 PARALLEL TRACKS Track: Collaboration and Social Networking

Session: Lightweight Stakeholder Collaboration Chair: Simon French, Manchester Business School. United Kingdom Room: ISCRAM-1 Disasters2.0: Application of Web2.0 technologies in emergency situations Camarero, Julio., Iglesias, Carlos A., ETSIT UPM, Spain This article presents a social approach for disaster management, based on a public portal, so-called Disasters2.0, which provides facilities for integrating and sharing user generated information about disasters. The architecture of Disasters2.0 is designed following REST principles and integrates external mashups, such as Google Maps. This architecture has been integrated with different clients, including a mobile client, a multiagent system for assisting in the decentralized management of disasters, and an expert system for automatic assignment of resources to disasters. As a result, the platform allows seamless collaboration of humans and intelligent agents, and provides a novel web2.0 approach for multiagent and disaster management research and artificial intelligence teaching. Web based macroseismic survey: fast information exchange and elaboration of seismic intensity effects in Italy. De Rubeis, Valerio., Sbarra, Paola., Tosi, Patrizia., Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Italy A renewed method of macroseismic survey, based on voluntary collaboration through Internet, is running at Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) since July 2007. The macroseismic questionnaire is addressed to a single non-specialist person; reported effects are statistically analyzed to extrapolate MercalliCancani-Sieberg and European Macroseismic Scale intensity referred to that observer. Maps of macroseismic intensity are displayed on-line in almost real time and are continuously updated. The aim of the questionnaire is to evaluate seismic effects as felt by the compiler. The final result is the definition of a particular intensity degree, with the evaluation of the associated uncertainty. Results of medium-low magnitude earthquakes are here presented showing the ability of the method in giving fast and interesting results. Effects reported in questionnaires coming from towns are analyzed in deep and assigned intensities are compared with those derived from traditional macroseismic survey, showing the reliability of web-based method. 42 - www.iscram.org

Expectation of Connectedness and Cell Phone Use in Crisis Sheetz, Steven D., Byoung Joon, Kim., Kavanaugh, Andrea., Quek, Fancis. Virginia Tech, United States of America The wide distribution of cell phones with messaging, email, and instant-messaging _ coupled always-on broadband networks _ have enabled the emergence of a culture of connectedness among segments of society. One result of this culture is an expectation of availability that exists among members of these social networks. This study explores the potential for this expectation to influence perceptions during and after a crisis. Semistructured interviews with Virginia Tech (VT) students, faculty and staff were conducted to understand how their prior expectations of connectedness affected their perceptions of their reach-ability, i.e., ability to contact others and others ability to contact them, during the VT shootings on April 16, 2007. Participants with higher expectations of connectedness also reported more problems with reach-ability. Those with the most problems with reach-ability differed from those with no reach-ability problems for many variables including satisfaction with the cell phone service, age, number of calls/text messages, and extroversion.

Track: Intelligent Systems

Session: Simulation and Resource Allocation Chair: Gerhard Wickler, University of Edinburgh. UK Room: ISCRAM-2 Using Computer Simulation for Emergency Response: Lessons Learned from the FireGrid Project Potter, Stephen., Wickler, Gerhard. University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Effective response to emergencies and crises depends upon the availability of accurate and focused information. With the growth of network computing, one potential source of such information that appears increasingly feasible is computer simulation. The authors have been involved with one project, FireGrid , that aims to make simulation results available to decision-makers in the context of fire emergencies in the built environment. In this paper we describe the FireGrid project and some of its results, and then attempt to generalize the lessons learned in order to help others considering the use of simulation for emergency response. Market Based Adaptive Resource Allocation for Distributed Rescue Teams Airy, Guruprasad., Mullen, Tracy., Yen, John. The Pennsylvania State University, USA The dynamic nature of real-world rescue scenarios (e.g., military, emergency first response, hurricane relief) requires constant re-evaluation of resource assignments. New events can trigger additional resource requirements

DMT-EOC – A combined system for the Decision Support and Training of EOC Members Engelmann, Hagen. (1), Fiedrich, Frank. (2) 1: Karlsruhe University, Germany; 2: The George Washington University, USA The first hours after a disaster are essential to minimize the loss of life. The chance for survival in the debris of a collapsed building for example decreases considerably after 72 h. However the available information in the first hours after a disaster is limited, uncertain and dynamically changing. The goal in the development of the Disaster Management Tool (DMT) was to support the handling of this situation. Its module DMT-EOC specifically deals with problems of the members in an emergency operation centre (EOC) by providing a training environment for table top exercises and assistance during earthquake disasters. The system is based on a flexible and extendible architecture able to integrate different concepts and programming interfaces. It contains a simulation providing a training environment for exercises and an evaluation of decisions during disaster response. Additionally a decision support is implemented as a multi-agent system (MAS) combining operation research approaches and rule-base evaluation for advice giving and criticizing of user decisions. The user interface supports a workflow model which mixes naturalistic with analytic decision-making. The paper gives an overview of the models behind the system components, describes their implementation and the testing of the resulting system.

Track: Open Track

Session: Information Processing in Environmental Crisis Chairs: Gregor Pavlin, D-CIS Lab / Thales Research & Technology. The Netherlands Michael Hiete, Universität Karlsruhe (TH). Germany Room: ISCRAM-3 Approaches to visualisation of uncertainties to decision makers in an operational Decision Support System Raskob, Wolfgang. (1), Gering, Florian. (2), Bertsch, Valentin. (3)

1: Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany; 2: Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, Germany; 3: EnBW, Germany Decision making in case of any emergency is associated with uncertainty of input data, model data and changing preferences in the decision making process. Uncertainty handling was from the beginning an integral part of the decision support system RODOS for the off-site emergency management following nuclear or radiological emergencies. What is missing so far is the visualisation of the uncertainties in the results of the model calculations. In this paper we present the first attempt to visualise uncertain information in the early and late phase of the decision making process. For the early phase, the area of sheltering was selected as example. For the later phase, the results of the evaluation subsystem of RODOS were selected being used for the analysis of remediation measures such as agricultural management options. Both attempts are still under discussion but the presentation of the early phase uncertainty will be realised in the next version. Central response to large chemical accidents Jensen, Jan Steen. (1), Pehrsson, Jan. (2) 1: Danish Emergency Management Agency, Denmark. 2: Prolog Development Center, Denmark Present scenarios, issues, requirements, experience and solutions from a central government organisation supporting local emergency management organisations. The presentation will cover the experience collected in the DIADEM project by the Danish Emergency Management Organisation with the focus of using ARGOS for response to chemical incidents. Integrating Scenario-Based Reasoning into MultiCriteria Decision Analysis Comes, Tina. (1), Hiete, Michael. (1), Wijngaards, Niek. (2), 1: Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany; 2: Thales Research & Technology Netherlands Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a technique for decision support which aims at providing transparent and coherent support for the resolution of complex decision situations taking into account subjective preferences of the decision makers, experts and stakeholders involved. However, MCDA does not foresee an analysis of multiple plausible future developments of a given situation. In contrast, scenario-based reasoning (SBR) is frequently used to assess (strategically) future developments on the longer term. The ability to discuss multiple plausible future developments provides a rationale for strategic plans and actions. Nevertheless, SBR lacks an in-depth performance evaluation of the considered actions. The integration of both techniques as well as their application in environmental crisis management is explored in this paper. The proposed model is illustrated by a small environmental incident example. Future work is to conduct validations on the basis of real-world environmental management scenarios by public Dutch and Danish chemical incident crisis management authorities.

ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 43

Papers, Presentations and Demos

generating conflicts about how to reassign resources across tasks in an emerging crisis. Reallocation is further complicated as some resources are synergistic (i.e., helicopter and pilot) and many distributed rescue teams have limited information about other teams_ status. We show how integrating a team-based multi-agent planning system with standard combinatorial auction methods to dynamically re-allocate resources can maximize overall rescue utility while providing for graceful managed degradation under conditions of extreme stress. The key innovation of our approach is that resource reallocation via combinatorial auctions is used to update the allocations as new tasks arrive over time, including the costs involved in dynamically switching resources from one task to another. We compare our system’s performance against two other approaches.

DEMO CONTRIBUTIONS TUESDAY 12th

Location: ISCRAM 2009 Lunch Venue

12:00 - 14:00 HANDS-ON DEMO SESSION Towards a Smart Control Room for Crisis Response Using Visual Perception of Users Ijsselmuiden, Joris Midas Maarten; Stiefelhagen, Rainer; van de Camp, Florian; Sckick, Alexander; Voit, Michael Fraunhofer IITB, Germany Due to ever increasing challenges and complexity, there is a high demand for new human-machine interaction approaches in crisis response scenarios. In the framework of the five-year Fraunhofer internal project “Computer Vision for Human-Computer Interaction – Interaction in and with attentive rooms” we aim at building a smart crisis control room, in which vision-based perception of users will be used to facilitate innovative user interfaces and to support teamwork. Our smart control room is equipped with several cameras and has a videowall as the main output and interaction device. Using real-time computer vision, we can track and identify the users in the room and estimate their head orientations and pointing gestures. In order to build a useful smart control room for crisis response, we are currently focusing on situation modeling for such rooms, and we are investigating the target crisis response scenarios. This presentation includes an overview of the project, ongoing work and future work. The Dynamic COMPAS Sarrat, Olivier Groupe URD, France The Dynamic COMPAS is an electronic system for managing the quality of humanitarian projects, based on the principles of Project Cycle Management and Quality Assurance. The Dynamic COMPAS is the COMPAS Quality Assurance Method in its operational form. It allows project memory to be created in real time as key elements are recorded step-by-step. The Dynamic COMPAS helps organisations to: • Strengthen transparency in decision-making thus promoting personal and collective accountability • Improve team communication by establishing a common language to be used throughout an organisation and across all sectors. Learn from past experience by allowing users to access information from other projects • Make decisions using a single analytical framework which gives a systemic view of the project • Improve monitoring and evaluation processes by 44 - www.iscram.org

means of quality indicators • Streamline reporting processes The Dynamic COMPAS aims to contribute to improving the quality of service brought to crisis-affected populations by: • Providing actors with a tool for improving the quality of humanitarian practices and operations using a single reference system common to every phase in the project cycle. • Improving diagnosis, design, planning, monitoring, evaluation and reporting processes of humanitarian projects • Improving the quality of evaluations On Scene Commander Toftedahl, Marcus (1); Hammar, Cecilia (2) 1: University of Skovde, Sweden; 2: Swedish Rescue Services Agency Quick and correct decisions are essential when acting as a commander on an incident site. Time is one of the most vital factors in order to limit the damages on surroundings and victims. To become an effective incident commander, continuous training is of great importance in order to keep tactics and methods up to date. ”On Scene Commander” gives incident commanders the opportunity to train a wide range of scenarios anytime, anywhere. On Scene Commander is developed specifically to the target audience, i.e. incident commanders at rescue services in Sweden. The game is easy to use and can be run on an ordinary office computer – all of this while maintaining the depth and accuracy of the strategic models used in real life incidents. Features of On Scene Commander: Well adapted to target user. Work methods, user interface and feedback given is tested on and developed specifically for incident commanders. Scenarios based on real life incidents. All scenarios in “On Scene Commander” is constructed based on data from incidents occurred. Student and Instructor mode. The game is designed for two different purposes; either played by a single player at work, in school or at home or to be used in larger groups of students in an education accompanied by an instructor. The challenge of On Scene Commander is to solve the given scenario with limited resources in a real-time modeled game world. The game records all player inputs and the goal is to “solve” the incident, using methods and tactics used in real life incidents. The player gets to try out strategies and methods in different scenarios based on data collected from incidents occurred in real life.

Analyzing cause and effect in a complex chain of events spanning over a large area, i.e. a distributed tactical operation, is a very difficult task for any analyst since the analyst will need to understand what is going on at multiple location simultaneously. It is obviously impossible for an analyst to observe everything everywhere. A computer supported approach to assist this is Reconstruction & Exploration (R&E), a technique that makes use of a multimedia model of the operation and enables post mission analysis. R&E has been used successfully to evaluate exercises and live operations in several domains, for instance military, fire brigade, crisis response and staffroom simulations. The R&E approach obviously benefits from tailored software, such as the F-REX Studio and accompanied toolset. The software helps the analyst in modeling, data integration and presentation of a synchronized multimedia-rich model that can be played back and analyzed in detail after the mission. The analysts will typically use the presentation feedback to assist their after-action reviews (AARs) or as a starting point for their analysis to try to answer their questions or prove/disprove hypotheses. Observer Tool for Data Collection in Distributed Environments - NBOT Sundmark, Thomas Swedish Defence Research Agency The network-based observer tool, NBOT, is a software tool designed to assist observers of field exercises and operations. The system is lightweight, inexpensive, easy-to-use and customizable to fit many different types of exercises or operations. The NBOT software is designed to run on many different platforms, ranging from desktop computers to PDAs and smartphones, allowing the observer to use one and the same user interface regardless of environmental circumstances. The tool helps the observer to determine what to report, when and how. A reported observation is timestamped (and position stamped if GPS enabled) and then sent to a data central as soon as network connection can be established. These quick and structured observation reports enable a remote staff to perform live analysis, exercise control and documentation on the fly. Collected data can quickly be integrated into analysis tools like F-REX for AAR presentation or post-mission analysis.

A Decision Support Tool for the Continuity of the Petroleum Supply Chain Using GIS and Systems Simulation Yeletaysi, Sarp (1); Fiedrich, Frank (1); van Dorp, Johan Rene (1); Harrald, John R. (2); Mazzuchi, Thomas A. (1); Deason, Jonathan P. (1); Renda-Tanali, Irmak (3) 1: The George Washington University, United States of America; 2: Virginia Tech, United States of America; 3: University of Maryland University College, United States of America One of the lessons learned from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is that natural disasters have the potential to cause disruptions in the U.S. energy infrastructure. A major hurricane may damage significant portions of U.S. petroleum infrastructure. The objective of this study is to develop an information systems framework to explore and quantify risk of disruptions in the U.S. petroleum supply chain caused by hurricanes. A semi-continuous supply chain simulation model and a Geographic Information System (GIS) are integrated. The research establishes a framework that fosters a more factual discussion of inherent petroleum supply chain risks. By defining standardized performance metrics the model ensures an objective comparison of disaster scenarios for strategic decision making, such as the appropriate safety inventories. Furthermore, the flexible and parametric design of the information system maintains the opportunity for expansion and modification of the model to address future decision problems and the absorption of scenarios and data that may not be available today. Information Sharing Using Live Video in Emergency Response Work Bergstrand, Fredrik; Landgren, Jonas The Viktoria Institute, Sweden The aim during the development of the application has been to enable rescue personnel to transmit live video from an incident site to the command center, and the demo will show how this is achieved. During the demo session the application will be demonstrated and the focus of discussion will be on how this type of technology impacts emergency rescue work and management. The live video application is the result of an ongoing research project conducted at the Viktoria Institute with funding from SAFER, and in collaboration with the Fire and Rescue Service, the Traffic and Road Authorities and the Emergency Paramedics Services in Gothenburg, Sweden. The research goal was to explore how live video could contribute to awareness and collaboration in the aftermath of a traffic incident, and the work resulted in a working prototype capable of broadcasting live video from incident sites. The application also has access to live video from the Road and Traffic departments’ network of traffic surveillance cameras. Mobile terminals transmit video data over the regular 3G network and a web application is used to distribute and view geo-positioned live video material. All video material are made available by all earlier mentioned organizations as they all may be effected by the incident. ISCRAM 2009, GOTHENBURG - 45

Papers, Presentations and Demos

Multimedia Tool for Analysis of Distributed Tactical Operations - F-REX Mörnestedt, Fredrik Swedish Defence Research Agency

Mobile Decision Support for operative field commanders Liljeroth, Lennart The Greater Gothenburg Rescue Services, Gothenburg, Sweden The application is used by fire crew commanders to have provides access to key information during emergency response work. It provides information such as alarminformation, general geographical information and location-specific data. The application has been in use in real response work as part of a pro-longed technology and work practice evaluation period. The plan is to deploy this application on all response units within the organization. The application runs on a ruggedized tablet-pc with a GSM/GPRS-connection. The application workspace is an interactive map with positioning features. Detailed location data is accessible for specific properties. Fire crew commanders use the application during enroute as well as on the accident location during the response work. The application is connected to stationary systems used in other administrative processes where location specific data is obtained. Such data might include property information, risk assessment and contact information. The data is depoyed in a design which are customized for the time-critical emergency response work. The novel idea behind the system is to provide a mobile decision support tool that is integrated to administrative processes. Operational Activity Security Information System (OASIS) Donahue, Joseph, M. iMMAP, United States of America The Information Management & Mine Action Programs (iMMAP) developed the Operational Activity Security Information System (OASIS) to provide a real-time Common Operating Picture of relief and development field programs and the safety and security environment in which they operate. OASIS combines operator-friendly data entry and analysis tools that allow the users to share and display a wide range of data on digital maps, graphs and reports that make the data intuitive to use. This increases safety and security in the field and protects the financial and political investments of donors by enhancing the effectiveness and reliability of aid delivery. iMMAP developed OASIS so that non-governmental organization (NGO) program managers are able to use the system to conduct both operational and strategic planning of their field activities based upon the real safety and security situation on the ground. Through the OASIS security module, NGOs are able to map security incidents and thereby provide near real-time updates for all OASIS clients. Users can focus upon using the OASIS system to provide 46 - www.iscram.org

critical Who’s Doing What Where (W3) knowledge in concert with safety and security data and facilitate greater data sharing among a wider range of partners. Users can access a clearer Common Operating Picture of the humanitarian situation where OASIS is used, enabling aid providers to more safely and efficiently deliver their goods and services. Operation of OASIS increases the quantity and quality of safety and security information collection, exchange, and dissemination among NGOs operating in the field, thus enabling these organizations to improve the safety and security of operating staff and their ability to empower and assist the marginalized and disadvantaged groups targeted by relief programs. OASIS provides the average computer user with: • Custom mapping capabilities – generate tailored maps instantly; • Easy-to-use analysis tools; • Standardized reporting formats; • Shared security incident data presented on digital maps and in narrative formats; • Location monitoring; • Custom chart and graph tools. The entire goal of OASIS is to “push” analysis tools into the hands of field operators so that they are not reliant upon centralized safety and security coordination mechanisms that frequently do not possess the time or resources to address the specific needs of each organization in the field.

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