Context-awareness in crisis management

Abstract

Successful management of critical situations created by major natural and man-made activities requires monitoring, recognizing, and making sense of these activities in order to support decision makers in either preventing a crisis or acting effectively to mitigate its adverse impact. Context plays an important role in crisis management since it provides decision makers with important information about current situations and situation dynamics in relation to their goals, functions and information needs, to enable them to appropriately adapt their decisions and actions. Efficient context exploitation for crises management requires a clear understanding of what context is and how to represent and use it. The paper represents an attempt to answer these questions by providing a discussion of the key issues of the problem of context definition, representation, discovery, and utilization in crisis management.

Context-based Information Fusion: A survey and discussion

“…Rogova discusses in [101] how context plays a central role in threat assessment and crisis management by providing decision makers important information regarding the situation and its dynamics with respect to their goals. Methods and issues in context representation and discovery are described in addition to designing a processing flow for context-aware crisis management systems.…”

Network Methods and Plan Recognition for Fusion in Crisis Management

“…In the seminal work (Llinas 2002), Llinas describes a multi-year research project directed at designing IF-based automatic system for crisis management. Rogova et al report on the progress of the activities of the project in a series of papers touching different research topics: in Scott and Rogova (2004) the characteristics of a disaster-stricken domain and of the data emerging from it are presented; in Little and Rogova (2005) an ontology describing the elements needed for building a situational picture of catastrophic events is commented; the work then approaches how to reason about disaster data in order to support SA (Rogova et al 2006), in particular for discovering unobserved events; the series also comprises the works (Steinberg and Rogova 2008;Rogova 2009) where the importance and role of contextual information in SA for crisis management are discussed.…”