Abstract: Throughout its history, Portugal Mainland and Azores Archipelago have suffered the catastrophic effects of earthquakes originating significant damages in buildings and human losses. Being aware of Portuguese seismic risk, civil protection authorities promoted some studies leading to the development of a seismic scenario simulation tool, applicable to some Mainland Portuguese regions. This paper describes recent improvements in the seismic scenario simulation tool, named LNECloss, and illustrates its applications to the evaluation of building damages and social losses, due to plausible seismic scenarios affecting Portugal. Some development requirements were identified in LNECloss simulator, namely making it available as a service on the Web, providing a stand alone tool, with no need of a geographic information desktop environment, although with the GIS capabilities of mapping and synthesis of the seismic scenario effects. In conclusion, the developed GIS Web Service offers a useful tool for seismic risk assessment and emergency planning and management.

Abstract: A precursor paper (also available as an OGC White Paper) provides a high-level overview of and architecture for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards activities that focus on sensors, sensor networks, and a concept called the “Sensor Web”. This OGC focus area is known as Sensor Web Enablement (SWE). For readers interested in greater technical and architecture details, please download and read the OGC SWE Architecture Discussion Paper titled “The OGC Sensor Web Enablement Architecture” (OGC document 06-021r1).

Abstract: In an emergency, people need to be able to report and find relevant information quickly. Fulfilling these information needs is the design goal of E-SOS: Emergency Situation Overview and Synthesis, a research project in progress. E-SOS will consist of (1) a website where users can report information, (2) web services that find and synthesize related information from multiple sources, and (3) interface tools that visualize and display links to this information. In this paper we describe three of these services and tools: the topic, geographic, and information space awareness tools. When a user writes a report, the topic awareness tool will execute a federated search and display links to related information. The information space awareness tool will highlight these links in a visualization of the information space. If the user refers to a location, the geographic awareness tool will focus a map on this location and display topic-related icons.

Abstract: Today, despite the obvious need, pre-hospital providers cannot send real-time electronic patient care information from the field to a receiving hospital. This lack of field awareness and inability to plan for the arrival-or anticipate the needs-of seriously ill or injured patients can lead to the misdirection of patients and the loss of valuable time in the early phases of resuscitation. We believe, however, that current technology can address these shortcomings and that is the focus of our research efforts. This paper discusses how several countries, including Israel, Sweden, Britain and the United States, are addressing the need to better triage patients from the field to an appropriate hospital or trauma center. It also introduces a potential solution, called iRevive, which uses emerging technology such as sensors, wireless WAN data transport, web services, artificial intelligence, and mobile devices to meet the dynamic needs of first responders and the hospitals they serve.

Abstract: Ontology matching is a key problem in many metadata intensive application domains, including emergency response, data integration, peer-to-peer information sharing, web service composition, and query answering on the web. In this paper we present an emergency response scenario based on the organizational model as used in Trentino region, Italy. We provide a formalization of this scenario with the help of lightweight coordination calculus. Then, we discuss an automatic approximate structure preserving matching algorithm which we applied within the emergency response scenario. The evaluation results, though preliminary, are encouraging.

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to describe the I-X system with its principal user interface, the I-X Process Panel, its underlying ontology, , and how this panel can be used as an intelligent to-do list that assists emergency responders in applying pre-defined standard operating procedures in different types of emergencies. In particular, multiple instances of I-X Process Panels can be used as a distributed system to coordinate the efforts of independent emergency responders as well as responders within the same organization. Furthermore, it can be used as an agent wrapper for other software systems such as web services to integrate these into the emergency response team as virtual members. The heart of the I-X system is an automated planner that can be used to synthesize courses of action or explore alternative options manually.

Abstract: This paper describes the proposed WIPER system. WIPER is intended to provide emergency planners and responders with an integrated system that will help to detect possible emergencies, as well as to suggest and evaluate possible courses of action to deal with the emergency. The system is designed as a multi-agent system using web services and the service oriented architecture. Components of the system for detecting and mitigating emergency situations can be added and removed from the system as the need arises. WIPER is designed to evaluate potential plans of action using a series of GIS enabled Agent-Based simulations that are grounded on realtime data from cell phone network providers. The system relies on the DDDAS concept, the interactive use of partial aggregate and detailed realtime data to continuously update the system and allow emergency planners to stay updated on the situation. The interaction with the system is done using a web-based interface and is composed of several overlaid layers of information, allowing users rich detail and flexibility.

Abstract: The paper addresses the issue of context-aware operational decision support in emergency situations. A decision support system (DSS) developed for this purpose is implemented as a network of a set of Web-services. The Web-services try to organise a service network according to context. Here the context is proposed to be modelled as a “problem model”. It specifies problems to be solved in a particular kind of emergency situation. Context is produced based on the knowledge extracted from the application domain (application ontology) and formalised by a set of constraints. The purpose of the service network is provision the DSS with contextualised information from diverse information sources and solving problems specified in the context. In the framework of context-aware operational decision support, composition of the application ontology for the disaster management domain from the Semantic Web Ontologies is discussed and a hybrid technology of context-aware operational decision support is presented. The technology is based on ontology management, context management, constraint satisfaction, and Web Services. Application of the ideas above is illustrated by an example of a decision support system for real-time resource coordination and situation awareness for logistics management in fire response operations.

Abstract: “Participatory Sensing is an approach to data collection and interpretation in which individuals, acting alone or in groups, use their personal mobile devices and web services to systematically explore interesting aspects of their worlds ranging from health to culture.”[ http://www.mobilizingcs.org/about/participatory-sensing] Data from the physical world of sensors and the virtual world of social networks and Linked Data can be combined into interesting high-level information. Sensor data can assist in localized information retrieval by giving the search engine direct access to events happening locally in the real world. Participatory sensing enables individuals and communities to collect and share granular, accurate data about a particular area. This paper describes work in progress within the FP7 EU-funded project SMART project to develop a multimedia search engine over content and information streaming from both the physical world and the Internet. We will identify some ethical problems regarding the use and storage of such data.

Abstract: This paper describes the OpenVCE system, which is an open-source environment that integrates Web 2.0 technology and a 3D virtual world space to support collaborative work, specifically in large-scale emergency response scenarios, where the system has been evaluated. The support is achieved through procedural knowledge that is available to the system. OpenVCE supports the distributed knowledge engineering of procedural knowledge in a semi-formal framework based on a wiki. For the formal aspect it relies on a representation used in AI planning, specifically, Hierarchical Task Networks, which corresponds naturally to the way emergency response procedures are described in existing Standard Operating Procedures. Knowledge engineering is supported by domain analysis that may highlight issues with the representation. The main contribution of this paper lies in a reasonably informal description of the analysis. The procedural knowledge available to OpenVCE can be utilized in the environment through plans generated by a planner and given to the users as intelligent, distributed to-do lists. The system has been evaluated in experiments using emergency response experts, and it was shown that procedural uncertainty could be improved, despite the complex and new technologies involved. Furthermore, the support for knowledge engineering through domain analysis has been evaluated using several domains from the International Planning Competition, and it was possible to bring out some issues with these examples.