From planning to resilience: The role (and value) of the emergency plan

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Technological Forecasting & Social Change. 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. A definitive version was subsequently published in Technological Forecasting & Social Change 121 (2017) 17–30. DOI 10.1016/j.techfore.2016.12.004.The study of resilience in the emergency management field is nowadays in effervescence. Traditionally, the robustness of organizations against disasters is based on several pillars: equipment, staff training, organization and, especially, planning. All of these dimensions are aimed at increasing the preparedness and recovery of organizations against disasters. While the approaches to resilience in emergency management focus on the processes that implement these dimensions, we approach resilience-building processes from a different perspective: instead of focusing on planning-related activities, we pay attention to the principal outcome of such activities, namely emergency plan. We show how the management of the emergency plan can contribute to reinforcing an organization's resilience. First, we identify the major resilience-related emergency plan components and suggest improved emergency plans that consider the characteristics that contribute to resilience. Secondly, we show how to reinforce the resilience of the organizations that have emergency plans. Our study is based on QuEP, a quality-based framework for the assessment and improvement of emergency plan management within organizations. We have extended and integrated the resilience characteristics as practices of the QuEP's maturity level hierarchy to make up QuEP + R. We describe its resilience model and give details of a supporting tool, currently under development. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.The work of M. C. Penades and J. H. Canos& was partially funded by MINECO under grant CALPE (TIN2015-68608-R) and A.G. NCifiez received support from SENESCYT scholarship program of the Republic of Ecuador.Penadés Gramage, MC.; Núñez Ávila, AG.; Canos Cerda, JH. (2016). From planning to resilience: The role (and value) of the emergency plan. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 121(3):17-30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.12.004S1730121

On the way to learning style models integration: a Learner's Characteristics Ontology

[EN] On the way to increasing customization in e-learning systems, the learner model is the main source of variability. Such a model includes a number of psychological characteristics and study preferences that describe the learner's personality traits related to learning. During the last decades, the design methods and tools for e-learning have been designed assuming speci fi c learner models. Therefore, in the search for a learning environment suitable for as many learner models as possible, we need tools to explore -and exploit- such models. In general, the learner's characteristics can be linked to the so-called learner's learning style (which is a part of the learner model) to provide the instructor with extensive knowledge about the learner's characterization in perceiving and processing information. Numerous learning styles have been proposed in the last decades, in some cases with overlapping characteristics with the same or different names. Thus, the heterogeneity of the learning style space makes it dif fi cult to handle cus- tomization effectively. In this paper, we introduce a Learner's Characteristics Ontology based on creating interconnections between the different learning style model dimensions and learning styles with the relevant learner's characteristics, that: (1) helps instructors to improve and personalize the learning content; (2) can recommend learning materials to learners according to their learning characteristics and preferences; (3) can provide both instructors and learners with extensive knowledge about how they can improve their teaching and learning abilities; and (4) can improve communications and interaction between humans and computers by specifying the semantics of the learning style models' characteristics.The work of J. H. Canos and M. C. Penades is funded by the Spanish MINECO under grant CALPE (TIN2015-68608-R).Ezzat Labib-Awad, A.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Penadés Gramage, MC. (2017). On the way to learning style models integration: a Learner's Characteristics Ontology. Computers in Human Behavior. 73:433-445. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.03.054S4334457

Advances in e-Participation: A perspective of Last Years

[EN] The opinions of citizens are now being given ever-increasing consideration. Today, many government administrations have set up public participation processes as one more of the inputs required to make a decision on several aspects of governance. e-Participation initiatives make it easier for citizens to access such processes. At the present time, there is no clear and accepted field definition due to the wide diversity of theoretical proposals and the interdisciplinary nature of the initiatives, many of which have been developed ad-hoc. This paper reviews the present literature in the field of e-Participation by means of a systematic mapping of the research work carried out in the timeframe 2000¿2019, together with some earlier relevant proposals in the area, with the aim of obtaining a conceptual guide to e-Participation components. This review analyses the findings and clusters the results into a conceptual e-Participation framework, which we call eP fw . The results show the diversity of the conceptualizations of many authors (25% on average) in the identification of tools, areas and levels in the field of e-participation and the almost null incorporation of fundamental aspects like trust, security, or transparency. We also found a lack of systems development (13.3%) that would prove and allow the proposed theories to be put into practiceThe work of A. Santamaría-Philco was supported in part by the Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) Scholarship Program of the Republic of Ecuador, and in part by the Universidad Laica Eloy Alfaro de Manabí (ULEAM). The work of J. H. Canós and M. C. Penadés was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Government of Spain through the Project CALPE under Grant TIN2015-68608-R and Grant BS123456.Santamaria-Philco, AA.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Penades Gramage, MC. (2019). Advances in e-Participation: A perspective of Last Years. IEEE Access. 7:155894-155916. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2948810S155894155916

Improving Emergency Plans through Public Engagement

Emergency plans are fundamental for the speedy and effective response in disaster situations. Plans are often constructed by teams of experts, who apply their knowledge to define response procedures, but lack part of location-specific knowledge that can be very relevant to make decisions during responses. Such knowledge is, however, in the minds of people who use those spaces every day, but are not involved in the planning processes. In this paper, we advocate for citizens' involvement in emergency plan elaboration via Public Participation, a mechanism long time used in other areas of e-government. We define a process for the elicitation of citizen's knowledge via public participation, and present the results of a study on its potential impact, where individuals used different collaborative tools to volunteer knowledge to be used in emergency plan improvement.Penadés Gramage, MC.; Vivacqua, AS.; Borges, M.; Canos Cerda, JH. (2011). Improving Emergency Plans through Public Engagement. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1133

Collaboration and Decision Making in Crisis Situations

[EN] Emergencies are critical situations that demand immediate action to avoid adverse consequences to life and property. Recent events around the world highlight the importance of the theme. A key challenge in Emergency Management is decision-making under time pressure, with an overload of unconfirmed, uncertain and conflicting information, including the management of many people, with distinct and possibly fluid roles, in different places. Collaboration in these settings is an interesting element, since emergency response generally involves multiple agencies and the public, which, having different views, protocols and priorities, must act in concert to handle the situation. In addition, an increasing amount of virtual information is necessary to inform and manage volunteers. The goal of this workshop is to identify and map the main challenges of collaboration in crisis situations, review current research methods and approaches to address them and address the lack of formal processes, structures, methodologies and tools.Adriana S Vivacqua is partially supported by CNPq grant 308425/2012-0 and FAPERJ grant E26/103.029/2012. Vaninha Vieira is partially supported by CNPq grant 490084/2013-3Vivacqua, AS.; Garcia, ACB.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Comes, M.; Vieira, V. (2016). Collaboration and Decision Making in Crisis Situations. ACM. 503-508. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2855520S50350

Enforcing reuse and customization in the development of learning objects: a product line approach

© ACM 2015.This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ACM, In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 261-263). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2695664.2695991.The growing use of information technologies in the educational cycles has raised new requirements for the development of In-teractive Learning Materials in terms of content reuse, customi-zation, and ease of creation and efficiency of production. In practical terms, the goal is the development of tools for creating reusable, granular, durable, and interoperable learning objects, and to compose such objects into meaningful courseware pieces. Current learning object development tools require special technical skills in the instructors to exploit reuse and customization features, leading sometimes to unsatisfactory user experiences. In this paper, we explore a new way to reuse and customization following Product Line Engineering principles and tools. We have applied product line-based document engineering tools to create the so-called Learning Object Authoring Tool (LOAT), which supports the development of learning materials following the Cisco s Reusable Information Object strategy. We describe the principles behind LOAT, outline its design, and give clues about how it may be used by instructors to create learning ob-jects in their own disciplines.This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. The work of J.H. Canós and M.C. Penadés is partially funded by the Spanish MEC under grant TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03).Ezzat Labib Awad, A.; Penades Gramage, MC.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Gómez Llana, A. (2015). Enforcing reuse and customization in the development of learning objects: a product line approach. ACM. doi:10.1145/2695664.2695991SIEEE LTSC, http://ieee-sa.centraldesktop.com/ltsc/Cisco Systems. 1999. Reusable information object strategy, "Definition, Creation over view, and guidelines".Cisco Systems. 2003. Reusable learning object strategy: Designing and developing learning objects for multiple learning approaches, Version 4.5 {white paper}.Merrill, M. D. 1983. Component display theory. In: Instructional design theories and models. Erlbaum Associates.Clark, R. 1989. Developing technical training: a structured approach for the development of classroom and computer-based instructional materials. Performance Technology Press, New York.A. Gómez, M. C. Penadés, J. H. Canós, M. R. S. Borges, M. Llavador. 2014. A framework for variable content document generation with multiple actors. Information and Software Technology, 2014, ISSN 0950--5849.Bloom, BS (ed.). 1956. "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives". Vol. 1: Cognitive Domain. New York: McKay

Crowdsourcing as a way to increase situational awareness of C&C Centers for emergency response

Rescue operations in most disasters are heavily dependent on accurate situational awareness. Having accurate and complete information is the key for making good decisions. A large amount of such information is contextual, that is, it is variable and needs to be taken from the disaster scenario by different means. While "Be safe! Stay away! Let professionals do the work!" is the typical approach of rescue operators with regard to people, there are also advantages of public engagement considering that Citizens generally have a better knowledge of the stricken area and know the daily routines of their family, friends and neighbors. This means that they can help in describing affected areas as well as in localizing possible victims. Inspired by the last sentence, we propose a framework based on these concepts and describe the set of actions that would make it possible. The framework named PENSAD stands for Public Engagement to increase Situational Awareness in Disasters .Da Silva Borges, M.; Vivacqua, AS.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Penades Gramage, MC.; Ruiza-Zafra, Á. (2014). Crowdsourcing as a way to increase situational awareness of C&C Centers for emergency response. ACM Digital Library. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/65293

Toward a Taxonomy for Classifying Crisis Information Management Systems

In this chapter, we describe the process and the preliminary results of developing a taxonomy of Crisis Information Management Systems (CIMS). Building the taxonomy, we aim at orienting the understanding of the area (main topics, interrelations, challenges, gaps, etc.) and guide the search of the literature and systems focused on the topic of interest. Following the iterative method proposed by Nickerson et al. in 2013, we focused on the emergency response stage of the emergency management lifecycle and defined a taxonomy organized along seven dimensions, namely, coordination, collaboration, information management, visualization, communication, intelligence, and global support; for each dimension, a number of characteristics understood as features of CIMS have been identified. The first version of the Tax-CIM taxonomy has been applied to the analysis of 15 CIMS, showing that some changes had to be made and led to a second and more robust version.Borges, MR.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Penades Gramage, MC.; Labaka Zubieta, L.; Bañuls, VA.; Hernantes Apezetxea, J. (2023). Toward a Taxonomy for Classifying Crisis Information Management Systems. En Disaster Management and Information Technology. Professional Response and Recovery Management in the Age of Disasters. Springer Link. 409-433. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20939-0_1940943

Visualizing composite knowledge in emergency responses using spatial hypertext

[EN] Having the right information at the right time is crucial to make decisions during emergency response. To fulfill this requirement, emergency management systems must provide emergency managers with knowledge management and visualization tools. The goal is twofold: on one hand, to organize knowledge coming from different sources, mainly the emergency response plans (the formal knowledge) and the information extracted from the emergency development (the contextual knowledge), and on the other hand, to enable effective access to information. Formal and contextual knowledge sets are mostly disjoint; however, there are cases in which a formal knowledge piece may be updated with some contextual information, constituting composite knowledge. In this paper, the authors extend a knowledge framework with the notion of composite knowledge, and use spatial hypertext to visualize this type of knowledge. The authors illustrate the proposal with a case study on accessing to information during an emergency response in an underground transportation system.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 7th Intemational Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 201 O), held from May 2 to 5, 2010 in Seattle, WA (USA). The work of J. H. Canós, M. C. Penadés and M. Llavador is partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (MICINN) underprojects DEEPEN (TIN2009-08084) and TlPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03). The work of C. Solis is funded by Science Foundation Ireland, grant 03/CE2/1303_1, to LERO. The workofM. R S. Bruges is partially supported by grantsNo. 304252/2008-5 and480461/2009-0, respectively, from CNPq (Brazil). The work of A. S.Vivacquais partially supportedby FAPERJ (Brazil).M. Llavadorwas theholderoftheMECFPU grant no. AP2005-3356. The cooperation between the Brazilian and the Spanish research groups was partially sponsored by the CAPES/MECD Cooperation Program, Project #169/PHB2007-0064-PC.Canos Cerda, JH.; Penadés Gramage, MC.; Solís Pineda, C.; Borges, MRS.; Vivacqua, AS.; Llavador Campos, M. (2011). Visualizing composite knowledge in emergency responses using spatial hypertext. International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. 3(3):52-65. https://doi.org/10.4018/jiscrm.2011070104S52653