Coordinating emergency response by competent teams

Abstract

ICTs and social networks can contribute to the emergence of creating competent teams for emergency response. For example, during disasters such as Pakistan flood of 2010, Japan tsunami of 2011 and Thailand flood of 2011, On-Line Social Networks (OSNs) have served as a main technology for numerous people seeking to share information about their personal status, to request resources, or to report the status of their community. They can be used at least for three main functions: detecting emergencies, disseminating information, and managing emergencies. On the other hand, the combination of Internet and mobile technology generated smart devices with associated sensor technologies that are becoming crucial parts in delivering supports during disaster and emergency situation. However, such use of mobile devices usually requires a reliable support system from crowdsensing technologies and back-end intelligent systems. In this way, the mobile crowdsensing must be designed with focus on mechanisms to identify and localize survivors and first responders in an incident zone, as well as mechanisms for competence characterization provided by social networks to facilitate coordination for individuals as well as crowds. These main technologies, the crowdsensing and social networks combined with semantic web and ontologies can provide a complete emergency response system that is the purpose of the CO-SEMIWA platform. This platform permits an interaction among participants to create dynamically competent teams where all participants perform tasks and solve problems in a specific emergency context and situation.