Developing a Framework for Stigmergic Human Collaboration with Technology Tools: Cases in Emergency Response

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and geographic information systems (GIS), have become a transformational force in emergency response. Social media enables ad hoc collaboration, providing timely, useful information dissemination and sharing, and helping to overcome limitations of time and place. Geographic information systems increase the level of situation awareness, serving geospatial data using interactive maps, animations, and computer generated imagery derived from sophisticated global remote sensing systems. Digital workspaces bring these technologies together and contribute to meeting ad hoc and formal emergency response challenges through their affordances of situation awareness and mass collaboration. Distributed ICTs that enable ad hoc emergency response via digital workspaces have arguably made traditional top-down system deployments less relevant in certain situations, including emergency response (Merrill, 2009; Heylighen, 2007a, b). Heylighen (2014, 2007a, b) theorizes that human cognitive stigmergy explains some self-organizing characteristics of ad hoc systems. Elliott (2007) identifies cognitive stigmergy as a factor in mass collaborations supported by digital workspaces. Stigmergy, a term from biology, refers to the phenomenon of self-organizing systems with agents that coordinate via perceived changes in the environment rather than direct communication. In the present research, ad hoc emergency response is examined through the lens of human cognitive stigmergy. The basic assertion is that ICTs and stigmergy together make possible highly effective ad hoc collaborations in circumstances where more typical collaborative methods break down. The research is organized into three essays: an in-depth analysis of the development and deployment of the Ushahidi emergency response software platform, a comparison of the emergency response ICTs used for emergency response during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and a process model developed from the case studies and relevant academic literature is described

The use of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and Crowdsourcing in Disaster Management: a Systematic Literature Review

The number of crisis events around the world has been increasing in the last years and suggests there is a real need to make communities more resilient to them. In addition to providing conventional authoritative data, ordinary citizens and residents in the affected areas are also voluntarily supplying information about the affected areas, in what has been called Crowdsourced or Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). This paper conducts a Systemic Literature Review aimed at assessing the current state of research in the use of VGI as a source of information to aid the management of disasters. The results suggest there is an increasing body of knowledge of VGI and the way it can improve disaster management. It also reveals gaps in the use of VGI in the research areas of ‘preparedness’ and ‘recovery’, as well as the need for more robust case studies and experimental research to support this promising field

Geovisual analytics for spatial decision support: Setting the research agenda

This article summarizes the results of the workshop on Visualization, Analytics & Spatial Decision Support, which took place at the GIScience conference in September 2006. The discussions at the workshop and analysis of the state of the art have revealed a need in concerted cross‐disciplinary efforts to achieve substantial progress in supporting space‐related decision making. The size and complexity of real‐life problems together with their ill‐defined nature call for a true synergy between the power of computational techniques and the human capabilities to analyze, envision, reason, and deliberate. Existing methods and tools are yet far from enabling this synergy. Appropriate methods can only appear as a result of a focused research based on the achievements in the fields of geovisualization and information visualization, human‐computer interaction, geographic information science, operations research, data mining and machine learning, decision science, cognitive science, and other disciplines. The name ‘Geovisual Analytics for Spatial Decision Support’ suggested for this new research direction emphasizes the importance of visualization and interactive visual interfaces and the link with the emerging research discipline of Visual Analytics. This article, as well as the whole special issue, is meant to attract the attention of scientists with relevant expertise and interests to the major challenges requiring multidisciplinary efforts and to promote the establishment of a dedicated research community where an appropriate range of competences is combined with an appropriate breadth of thinking

SEMA4A: An ontology for emergency notification systems accessibility

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. Reaching this goal is challenging due to users’ diversity: people with disabilities, elderly and children, and other vulnerable groups. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for such systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deafblind people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages over distinct emergency response information systems providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users.Ministerio de Educación y Cienci

Collaborative 3D Modeling: Conceptual and Technical Issues

peer reviewedThe need of 3D city models increases day by day. However, 3D modeling still faces some impediments to be generalized. Therefore, new solutions such as collaboration should be investigated. The paper presents a new vision of collaboration applied on 3D modeling through the definition of the concept of a 3D collaborative model. The paper highlights basic questions to be considered for the definition and the development of that model then argues the importance of reuse of 2D data as a promising solution to reconstruct 3D data and to upgrade to integrated 3D solutions in the future. This idea is supported by a case study, to demonstrate how 2D/2.5D data collected from different providers in Walloon region in Belgium can be integrated and reengineered to match the specifications of a 3D building model compatible with the CityGML standard

Enablers in Crisis Information Management: A Literature Review

Social media often plays a central role in crisis informatics as it is an important source for assessing, understanding, and locating crises quickly and accurately. In addition, social media enables actors to react more effectively and efficiently when managing crises. However, enablers of crisis information management have not been carved out explicitly in a systematic view. Therefore, we perform a literature review to synthesize the existing literature on crisis information management with a focus on technical enablers and their classification into the crisis-management phases. As our results show, searching for crisis informatics mostly results in social media-related publications. We found that Twitter is one of the most important technical enablers but that research on other social media platforms is underrepresented. Also, most publications center on the post-crisis phases of crisis management, leaving out the pre-crisis phases

Emergency Alerts for all: an ontology based approach to improve accessibility in emergency alerting systems

11 pages, 7 figures.-- Contributed to: 5th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Respose and Management (ISCRAM2008, Washington, DC, USA, May 4-7 2008).When a disaster occurs it is critical that emergency response information systems share a common ontology to support their disaster management alerting functions and notifications. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so it is crucial, for emergency systems, to be able to transmit them to all kinds of recipients. An ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deaf people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages and contents over different emergency response information systems and to be accessible under different conditions and for different kind of users.This work has been partly funded by UIA4SIGE (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TSI2007-60388) and MDDSIGE (CAM-UC3M CCG06-UC3M/TIC-0787) projects.Publicad