Abstract: Building community resilience to natural disasters represents a major policy priority for the United States as hazards impact vulnerable urban regions with increasing frequency and severity. Applying network analysis techniques, we examine the dynamics of emergency response to Superstorm Sandy, which struck the United States east coast in late October 2012 and caused over $72 billion in damages. Drawing on a variety of data sources and analytical techniques, we document the storm's impact on a system of interacting private, public, and nonprofit organizations. We find that the storm's response network exhibited clear patterns of information gaps and flows among different types of organizations. Our findings suggest a general lack of communication between government agencies and businesses, an area of potential improvement in future regional-scale emergency response systems.

Abstract: Correct information is a vital resource during disasters. Without adequate information, response actions may be ineffective. What is the source of information of emergency management systems? Besides that originated from sensors, the emergency team and the public in general, a very relevant source is government data, such as demographic and geographic data, road maps, etc. The heterogeneity of information formats is a well-known problem that affects organizations and communities that want to access public data. Today, most public agencies provide access to their data, but the great majority is unreadable by automated mechanisms. Besides, most of them do not provide a dictionary meaning for the published content. A solution to this problem is of particular importance to emergency response organizations that need access to all information available to better respond to disasters and crisis. The linked open data (LOD) initiative allows the interconnection of data, using standards in the context of the semantic web approach. In ideal conditions, government agencies publish their public data, thus allowing the use of automated data concerned consumers, whether they are other government agencies or citizens. Efforts aimed to link government data are growing in several countries around the world. This talk presents the LOD concepts and describes an architecture that uses LOD in the design of an Emergency Management System. It describes a scheme for collecting available data from government agencies, such as departments of health, transport, works, that can supply information needs during an emergency response operation.

Abstract: Crisis organisations depend on telecommunication services; unavailability of these services reduces the effectiveness of crisis response. Crisis organisations should therefore be aware of availability risks, and need a suitable risk assessment method. Such a method needs to be aware of the exceptional circumstances in which crisis organisations operate, and of the commercial structure of modern telecom services. We found that existing risk assessment methods are unsuitable for this problem domain. Hence, crisis organisations do not perform any risk assessment, trust their supplier, or rely on service level agreements, which are not meaningful during crisis situations. We have therefore developed a new risk assessment method, which we call RASTER. We have tested RASTER using a case study at the crisis organisation of a government agency, and improved the method based on the analysis of case results. Our initial validation suggests that the method can yield practical results. © 2012 ISCRAM.