CAMEO Stakeholders Report

Computer-Aided Management of Emergency Operations (CAMEO) is a suite of software applications used to plan for and respond to chemical emergencies. CAMEO was first released in 1986, and was jointly developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assist front-line chemical emergency planners and responders. It has since undergone numerous modification and upgrades, and is a critical tool used today for chemical spills, other hazards, and emergency management. The CAMEO system integrates a chemical database and a method to manage the data, an air dispersion model, and a mapping capability. All modules work interactively to share and display critical information in a timely fashion. As a result of fatal chemical accidents in recent years, Executive Order (EO) 13650 (Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security) was signed on August 1, 2013 for: Improving Operational Coordination with State, Local and Tribal partners Enhancing Federal Coordination Enhancing Information Collection and Sharing Modernizing Regulations, Guidance, Policy and Standards Identifying Best Practices. The CAMEO team has been working to address these EO requirements and the areas of action in a manner that will best meet the needs of CAMEO users and stakeholders

Common vocabularies for collective intelligence - work in progress

Web based applications and tools offer a great potential to increase the efficiency of information flow and communication among different agents during emergencies. Among the different factors, technical and non technical, that hinder the integration of an information model in emergency management sector, is a lack of a common, shared vocabulary. This paper furthers previous work in the area of ontology development, and presents a summary and overview of the goal, process and methodology to construct a shared set of metadata that can be used to map existing vocabulary. This paper is a work in progress report

Addendum to Informatics for Health 2017: Advancing both science and practice

This article presents presentation and poster abstracts that were mistakenly omitted from the original publication

Asynchronous Multi-Context Systems

In this work, we present asynchronous multi-context systems (aMCSs), which provide a framework for loosely coupling different knowledge representation formalisms that allows for online reasoning in a dynamic environment. Systems of this kind may interact with the outside world via input and output streams and may therefore react to a continuous flow of external information. In contrast to recent proposals, contexts in an aMCS communicate with each other in an asynchronous way which fits the needs of many application domains and is beneficial for scalability. The federal semantics of aMCSs renders our framework an integration approach rather than a knowledge representation formalism itself. We illustrate the introduced concepts by means of an example scenario dealing with rescue services. In addition, we compare aMCSs to reactive multi-context systems and describe how to simulate the latter with our novel approach.Comment: International Workshop on Reactive Concepts in Knowledge Representation (ReactKnow 2014), co-located with the 21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2014). Proceedings of the International Workshop on Reactive Concepts in Knowledge Representation (ReactKnow 2014), pages 31-37, technical report, ISSN 1430-3701, Leipzig University, 2014. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-15056

Crisis translation: considering language needs in multilingual disaster settings

Purpose: The purpose of this conceptual paper is to highlight the role that language translation can play in disaster prevention and management and to make the case for increased attention to language translation in crisis communication. Approach: The article draws on literature relating to disaster management to suggest that translation is a perennial issue in crisis communication. Findings: Although communication with multicultural and multilinguistic communities is seen as being in urgent need of attention, we find that the role of translation in enabling this is underestimated, if not unrecognised. Value: This article raises awareness of the need for urgent attention to be given by scholars and practitioners to the role of translation in crisis communication

A Survey on IT-Techniques for a Dynamic Emergency Management in Large Infrastructures

This deliverable is a survey on the IT techniques that are relevant to the three use cases of the project EMILI. It describes the state-of-the-art in four complementary IT areas: Data cleansing, supervisory control and data acquisition, wireless sensor networks and complex event processing. Even though the deliverable’s authors have tried to avoid a too technical language and have tried to explain every concept referred to, the deliverable might seem rather technical to readers so far little familiar with the techniques it describes

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio