Intelligent m-government services : a mobile-based emergency response system

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Recent advances in Internet technologies and services have allowed governments to deal with their citizens in a new way, through mobile platforms. The use of mobile technologies assists people by providing access to information anytime and anywhere. The demand for better, more efficient and more effective government services will put serious pressure on the government with regard to m-Government. m-Government is the next inevitable direction of the evolution of e-Government. In an emergency response system, mobile technology can be used to link citizens, businesses and non-profit organisations. For example, in an emergency situation such as the 9/11 terrorist attack, mobile technology can be used to enhance productivity, connectivity and response and facilitate rapid access to information anytime and anywhere. This was the impetus of this research into emergency response systems based on mobile technology. A mobile-based emergency response system (MERS) is as one of the important new services of m-Government. It aims to support people (mobile users) in emergency situations through their mobile phones by giving them access to essential advice and information. It also provides information to the government to reduce risks. The main goal of this study is to make use of mobile technology to assist in information dissemination and decision making in response to disasters anytime and anywhere. Design research methodology is employed to address the primary research question: How can m-Government be used for dealing with emergency response systems? This research presents an MERS framework that has five main components-register, monitoring, analysis, decision support and warning-aiming to provide a new function and service to m-Government. The proposed framework would also offer a new opportunity for interaction among government, citizens, responders and other nongovernment agencies in emergency situations. According to this MERS framework, relevant information system techniques (algorithms and approaches) were developed to support the most important applications for the MERS. These applications are ontology-based information extraction (OBIE) and aggregation and an ontology-supported case-based reasoning (OS-CBR) approach for the MERS. OBIE has four main functions: to collect unstructured information from short message service (SMS) emergency text messages; to conduct information extraction (IE) and aggregation including lexical analysis, name entity recognition, merging structure, normalisation and duplication; to calculate the similarity of SMS text messages; and to generate query and results presentation. The OS-CBR approach consists of four main functions: data acquisition, knowledge base, case-based reasoning (CBR) component, and knowledge presentation. More important, a MERS prototype system has been designed and developed in this study. Experiments conducted to evaluate the major algorithm, approach and prototype system show that MERS, as an implementation of the IE algorithm and OS-CBR approach, is an effective means of classification in terms of precision, recall, F-measure and overall accuracy

m-Government: A framework of mobile-based emergency response systems

Mobile government (m-Government) is the next inevitable direction of evolution of e-Government. A mobile-based emergency response system (MERS) is one of the important m-Government services. A MERS under m-Government platform is a mobile-based information system designed to let people get help from the government in an emergency situation. It also makes the use of mobile technologies to assist the government to get information and make decisions in responding disasters anytime and anywhere. This paper presents a framework of MERS which has five main components (register, monitoring, analysis, decision support, and warning) aiming to provide a new function and service to m-Government. The proposed MERS framework would also offer a new opportunity to interact between government, citizens, responders, and other non-government agencies in emergency situations. © 2008 IEEE

Ontology-supported case-based reasoning approach for intelligent m-Government emergency response services

There is a critical need to develop a mobile-based emergency response system (MERS) to help reduce risks in emergency situations. Existing systems only provide short message service (SMS) notifications, and the decision support is weak, especially in man-made disaster situations. This paper presents a MERS ontology-supported case-based reasoning (OS-CBR) method, with implementation, to support emergency decision makers to effectively respond to emergencies. The advantages of the OS-CBR approach is that it builds a case retrieving process, which provides a more convenient system for decision support based on knowledge from, and solutions provided for past disaster events. The OS-CBR approach includes a set of algorithms that have been successfully implemented in four components: data acquisition; ontology; knowledge base; and reasoning; as a sub-system of the MERS framework. A set of experiments and case studies validated the OS-CBR approach and application, and demonstrate its efficiency. Copyright © 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Mobile-Based Emergency Response System Using Ontology-Supported Information Extraction

This chapter describes an algorithm within a Mobile-based Emergency Response System (MERS) to automatically extract information from Short Message Service (SMS). The algorithm is based on an ontology concept, and a maximum entropy statistical model. Ontology has been used to improve the performance of an information extraction system. A maximum entropy statistical model with various predefined features offers a clean way to estimate the probability of certain token occurring with a certain SMS text. The algorithm has four main functions: to collect unstructured information from an SMS emergency text message; to conduct information extraction and aggregation; to calculate the similarity of SMS text messages; and to generate query and results presentation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

Simulation-based performance analysis of dynamic channel scheduling algorithm

Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) has gained a lot of attention in industry recently. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) presents itself as a good alternative physical layer of WPAN, for both high and low data rate applications. Here, we present an algorithm that can utilize the available channels in UWB systems. The algorithm is known as Dynamic Channel Scheduling Algorithm (DCSA). The proposed algorithm is based on a distributed dynamic channel allocation technique to distribute the channels among neighboring piconets. The purpose of the algorithm is to increase the spectral Efficiency (SE) and the Quality of Service(QoS) of the system. We also present the algorithm in details and a numerical example to describe the algorithm is given

A mobile-based emergency response system for intelligent m-government services

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present an intelligent mobile based emergency response system (MERS) framework, a text information extraction and aggregation algorithm to integrate information from multiple sources in the MERS system, and an ontology-supported case-based reasoning system for the MERS system. Design/methodology/approach: The paper explains the components of information extraction and aggregation process, and a CBR-Ontology approach for the MERS system. Findings: The result of this study will offer a new opportunity to the interaction between government, citizens, responders, and other non-government agencies in emergency situations, and therefore improve the services of the government in an emergency situation. Originality/value: The paper indicates the need for usage of mobile technologies to assist the government to get information and make decisions in responding to disasters anytime and anywhere. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Dynamic channel scheduling for UWB-based WPAN

Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) has gained a lot of attention in industry recently. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) presents itself as a good alternative physical layer of WPAN, for both high and low data rate applications. Here, we present an algorithm that can utilize the available channels in UWB systems. The algorithm is known as Dynamic Channel Scheduling Algorithm (DCSA). The proposed algorithm is based on a distributed dynamic channel allocation technique to distribute the channels among neighboring piconets. The purpose of the algorithm is to increase the spectral Efficiency (SE) and the Quality of Service(QoS) of the system. We also present the algorithm in details and a numerical example to describe the algorithm is given