Semantic Geotagging: A Location-Based Hypermedia Approach to Creating Situational Awareness

Abstract

Abstract. As emergency first responders and commanders increasingly use mobile phones, tablets, and social media to communicate, coordinate, and manage information during disasters, we see a need and opportunity to provide a mobile device-appropriate semantic layer to a geographically-based common operating picture. The challenge is to provide a simple, usable structure for a rapidly growing body of information to simplify the development of situational awareness in an unfolding disaster. We use a hyperlinked structure based on the ASK model to organize information in a readily accessible form. In this paper we describe our initial design and experience with an Android-based prototype, supported by a Ruby on Railsbased repository service. Our prototype allows the incorporation, aggregation, assessment, and redistribution of dynamic human-generated and sensorderived information.

The Analysis of Information Crowdsourcing Cloud for Disaster Management: Case Studies of Taiwan Morakot Typhoon

“…The extracted information through "Morakot Typhoon disaster information map" platform provided instinctive graphical interface, so the manifestation of relevance is more significant. The result corresponded with the ideas raised by Bareiss et al and Goodchild et al (Bareiss et al 2011;Goodchild et al 2010). Due to the uncomplicated online database interface, the integrity and traceability showed better results in "Table of typhoon disaster information" platform.…”

A Survivable Social Network

“…To enable this, we designed an extension to the SNE that integrated an external event-logging database as an SSN network peer, and we created tools to present selective events from this database on a CERT situation map. Inspired by Semantic Geotagging [31], we provided the means for CERT team members to engage SSN subscribers in multiturn text-and-image discussions of scripted disaster events. CERT team members had the further capability to escalate issues they considered important enough to the city level with corresponding real-time presentation of the conversation in the mobile EOC.…”

Enhanced situational awareness and communication for emergency response

“…Our objectives can be addressed by mobile sensing [2], using the sensors built into current smartphones. To attain the data acquisition objectives, we propose to provide the first responders with instantaneous and ubiquitous access to the required information such as a list of hazardous materials at the incident site independently before entering the affected room.…”

“…There are two main elements common to almost every workplace incident: (1) data acquisition and, (2) communication between responders. Acquiring the requisite information related to the incident is vital for the responders to deal with the situation in a timely manner during an emergency.…”