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In a crisis situation, critical success factors include good preparedness, the availability of trustworthy information and reliable people, and the responders' ability to improvise with the available, functioning tools. Wikis can be used as collaborative group support systems to support these activities, especially for communities of practice that must operate as high reliability organizations. The advantages of using a wiki are especially beneficial in volatile environments, such as those in the emergency domain, where critical real-time decision making is required. An international wikiemergenciWiki.org -has been created and is being used by both practitioners and academics. The conclusions include that wiki features and functionality, which are important for safetycritical work, should add a minimum of bureaucratic overhead while helping to establish trust and a sense of purpose and community among the users, thus easing the evaluation of information reliability while strenghening ad hoc group interaction.

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Today's industrial market is global. Manufacturing and measuring products are geographically distributed all over the world. Furthermore, the products are sophisticated and include know-how, often in the form of software. Thus the manufacturer is often the only party that can provide the maintenance services. In this paper, we focus on single intelligent and resource Iimited devices, which need to be remotely monitored or controlled . With the global Internet, satellite and telephone networks the access itself becomes possible. However, security is achallenge, because the remote devices ' Iimited resources are pitted against threats from the Internet. We discuss the assets of and threats against a globally distributed industrial information system. To protect the assets, three possible security architectures , Centralized connections, Layered architecture and Integration of centralized and layered architecture, are proposed. Of these three, the integrated architecture meets best the requirements of a globally distributed industrial information system.