eStorys: A visual storyboard system supporting back-channel communication for emergencies

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of Visual Languages & Computing. 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 @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Banco Santander

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

Collaborative Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays - BigWallHCI 2013 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop

The 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays in Situation Rooms and Monitoring Centres was co-organised by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, Austria. It took place in the European Crisis Management Laboratory (ECML) of the JRC in Ispra, Italy, from 18 to 19 April 2013. 40 participants from stakeholders in the EC, civil protection bodies, academia, and industry attended the workshop. The hardware of large display areas is on the one hand mature since many years and on the other hand changing rapidly and improving constantly. This high pace developments promise amazing new setups with respect to e.g., pixel density or touch interaction. On the software side there are two components with room for improvement: 1. the software provided by the display manufacturers to operate their video walls (source selection, windowing system, layout control) and 2. dedicated ICT systems developed to the very needs of crisis management practitioners and monitoring centre operators. While industry starts to focus more on the collaborative aspects of their operating software already, the customized and tailored ICT applications needed are still missing, unsatisfactory, or very expensive since they have to be developed from scratch many times. Main challenges identified to enhance big wall display systems in crisis management and situation monitoring contexts include: 1. Interaction: Overcome static layouts and/or passive information consumption. 2. Participatory Design & Development: Software needs to meet users’ needs. 3. Development and/or application of Information Visualisation & Visual Analytics principle to support the transition from data to information to knowledge. 4. Information Overload: Proper methods for attention management, automatic interpretation, incident detection, and alarm triggering are needed to deal with the ever growing amount of data to be analysed.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Integrating Decision-Making Support in Geocollaboration Tools

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

GISualisation: a tool for visually supporting planning processes

The evaluation of quality of life in cities can be supported by the analysis of data coming from different sources and describing different aspects such as economic, social, environmental, energy, housing or mobility issues. Nevertheless, the analysis of such big amounts of data is difficult so that only expert technicians can access to their inner contents. Furthermore, the outcomes of these analyses are often presented in static outcomes which reproduce the reasoning of technicians who have not expertise in urban studies. Thus, planners and decision-makers have to base their own choices on given outcomes without opportunities for personally investigating the inner contents of data. In order to facilitate the data exploration and readability by non-technicians, a GIS-based visualization tool, namely “GISualisation”, has been realized to give to both planners and actors involved in planning processes, a decision support system useful to visualize the inter-relations between data which describe cities. The tool is a web-based interactive visual tool, which works on geo-referenced dynamic maps, currently created with free Web GIS applications. GISualisation displays data on a map and offers the possibility to select and filter data by single attributes, allowing users to interact readily with large databases and customise the visualisation of information. Thus, the tool offers a simple interface to visualise GIS data on the basis of users’ requests, providing a support for planners and decision-makers to explore data and detect issues of inefficiency, ineffectiveness or critical areas which needs further reasoning on their planning or design. Furthermore, it can be used in collaborative and participatory session so to improve the information sharing among participants. Depending on the case study, the tool can be adapted and customized to visualise different type of data, ensuring user-friendliness and possibility to explore the relationships between data. GISualisation has already been applied in investigating inefficiencies in a public transport system (Pensa, Masala, Arnone, & Rosa, 2013), in studying pedestrian paths in an urban area, in analysing urban population health and in the evaluation of social housing projects. Further developments will include the integration with the interactive Visualisation Tool (InViTo) (Pensa, Masala, & Lami, 2013; Pensa & Masala, 2014) and the possibility to include real-time data feeds. Through GISualisation, data on quality of life can be investigated and visually analysed so to offer a new tool to actors involved in planning process for detecting critical areas and improving the urban planning process

Knowledge visualisation criteria for supporting knowledge transfer in incident management systems

During an incident, which is critical in nature, sense-making by the individuals involved are essential in ensuring an optimal response to the incident. The incident management systems employed to manage the allocation of resources to an incident allow for the visualisation of the incident and its constituents, and this visualisation supports sense-making by improving knowledge transfer. Knowledge visualisation contains pitfalls that can be avoided by implementing knowledge visualisation criteria. The purpose of this study is to identify the knowledge visualisation criteria that optimise the knowledge transfer by visual artifacts in incident management systems like emergency medical or fire-response systems. This study used the design science research (DSR) methodology and was conducted in the context of critical incident response management. A review of the existing literature was done to identify an initial set of knowledge visualisation criteria. The initial set was evaluated by content experts (using questionnaire driven interviews) and usability experts (using questionnaire driven interviews, usability testing with eye tracking and a survey) in the context of an emergency incident management system. The main contribution of this study is a validated set of knowledge visualisation criteria to guide knowledge transfer in incident management systems.School of ComputingM. Sc. Computin

MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application

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

Map functions to facilitate situational awareness during emergency events

Emergency events such as floods and wildfires are handled by various responders and at various levels: strategic, tactical, and operational. To facilitate situational awareness, emergency responders require customized map-based decision support systems that are tailored to specific needs depending on the responders’ organizational affiliation, role, objectives, and occupationally specific knowledge. As a result, the systems are equipped with manifold map functions. However, the diversity of map-based emergency tools in use impedes gaining common user skills among their target audiences and thus, requires a systematic overview. Through a multistep research process, this study was to: investigate the requirements for support from map-based tools expressed by various emergency responders in Norway, identify desired map functions, and categorize those functions to facilitate an overview. Six stages constituted our workflow: meetings with Norwegian emergency responders, survey on selected map-based tools, interviews with designers and users of tools, a table-top exercise, theoretical considerations, and validation with stakeholders. This study contributes to the state of the art by systematizing and structuring knowledge about map functions that facilitate situational awareness. In turn, it helps developing and optimizing functionality of map-based tools depending on needs of specific emergency responders.publishedVersionPaid open acces