Towards a Metamodel supporting E-government Collaborative Business Processes Management within a Service-based Interoperability Platform

Interoperability between different organizations is a complex task, where a key element is to be able to define without ambiguity the concepts that are involved in each domain and their relations. A key aspect for enabling e-government is the technological support for complex interaction scenarios, defining collaborative Business Processes (BPs) that are the basis for these interactions. E-government collaborative BPs involve several and heterogeneous participants: organizations, partners, and users, with different capabilities, needs, and available technical support. The goal of this paper is to present ongoing research on e-government cross-organizational collaborative BPs support in a service-based interoperability platform. This proposal is focused on the formalization and exploitation of e-government knowledge and information (i.e., metamodels and ontologies) to improve the definition, automated generation, control, monitoring and improvement of e-government collaborative BPs

Expanding Awareness: Comparing Location, Keyword, and Network Filtering Methods to Collect Hyperlocal Social Media Data

Opportunities to collect real-time social media data during a crisis remain limited to location and keyword filtering despite the sparsity of geographic metadata and the tendency of keyword-based methods to capture information posted by remote rather than local users. Here we introduce a third, network filtering method that uses social network ties to infer the location of social media users in a geographic community and collect data from networks of these users during a crisis. In this paper we compare all three methods by analyzing the distribution of situational reports of infrastructure damage and service disruption across location, keyword, and network-filtered social media data during a weather emergency. We find that network filtering doubles the number of situational reports collected in real-time compared to location and keyword filtering alone, but that all three methods collect unique reports that can support situational awareness of incidents occurring across a community

Social media processing in crisis response : an attempt to shift from data to information exploitation.

Information about the ongoing events is of the utmost importance during emergencies. Previous work in crisis informatics found new ways to pull data from unexploited sources, such as social media. But while the volume of information is crucial, the way the information is reported and provided becomes increasingly important as the volume grows. Yet, little has been achieved on information management. This article proposes a way to automatically organize information from social media data up to decision-makers. This organization is enabled by a metamodel \cite{benaben_metamodel_2016} designed to model crucial information in crises. The article is organized as follows. First, the organization of current social media processing systems is presented. Then, the article presents the metamodel used and how it is relevant to organized information in crisis events through the lens of the 6W\u27s \cite{kropczynski_identifying_2018}. Finally, it walks through the implementation of the proposal based on the two previous parts

A Social Platform for Knowledge Gathering and Exploitation, Towards the Deduction of Inter-enterprise Collaborations

AbstractSeveral standards have been defined for enhancing the efficiency of B2B web-supported collaboration. However, they suffer from the lack of a general semantic representation, which leaves aside the promise of deducing automatically the inter-enterprise business processes. To achieve the automatic deduction, this paper presents a social platform, which aims at acquiring knowledge from users and linking the acquired knowledge with the one maintained on the platform. Based on this linkage, this platform aims at deducing automatically cross-organizational business processes (i.e. selection of partners and sequencing of their activities) to fulfill any opportunity of collaboration

A new emergency decision support system: the automatic interpretation and contextualisation of events to model a crisis situation in real-time

This paper studies, designs and implements a new type of emergency decision support system that aims to improve the decision-making of emergency managers in crisis situations by connecting them to new, multiple data sources. The system combines event-driven and model-driven architectures and is dedicated to crisis cells. After its implementation, the system is evaluated using a realistic crisis scenario, in terms of its user interfaces, its ability to interpret data in real time and its ability to manage the 4Vs of Big Data. The input events correspond to traffic measurements, water levels, water flows, water predictions and flow predictions made available by French official services. The main contributions of this study are: (i) the connection between a complex event processing engine and a graph database containing the model of the crisis situation and (ii) the continuous updating of a common operational picture for the benefit of emergency managers. This study could be used as a framework for future research works on decision support systems facing complex, evolving situations

Real-time data exploitation supported by model- and event-driven architecture to enhance situation awareness, application to crisis management

An effective crisis response requires up-to-date information. The crisis cell must reach for new, external, data sources. However, new data lead to new issues: their volume, veracity, variety or velocity cannot be managed by humans only, especially under high stress and time pressure. This paper proposes (i) a framework to enhance situation awareness while managing the 5Vs of Big Data, (ii) general principles to be followed and (iii) a new architecture implementing the proposed framework. The latter merges event-driven and model-driven architectures. It has been tested on a realistic flood scenario set up by official French services

Role Playing Next Generation 9-1-1: Sensemaking with Social Media in Public-Safety Answering Points

For over a decade, research has suggested that social media can enhance the situational awareness of emergency responders during a crisis. Rarely, however, do studies examine the sensemaking processes of emergency responders by which situational awareness is achieved. We examine sensemaking in a Public-Safety Answering Point (PSAP) through role plays with 9-1-1 telecommunicators that imagine how social media analysts can contribute to sensemaking processes among 9-1-1 call takers, dispatchers, and emergency responders. These role plays suggest social media can address information gaps that emerge when 9-1-1 callers fail to provide critical information and vice versa, suggesting social media enhances situational awareness only when integrated into sensemaking processes that synthesize information across multiple, incomplete, but complementary data sources. This synthesis, however, requires cooperative information gathering and sharing among call takers, dispatchers, and social media analysts that PSAPs can coordinate using common interpretive frameworks and common information spaces

An AI framework and a metamodel for collaborative situations: Application to crisis management contexts

Identifying, designing, deploying and maintaining accurate collaborative networks of organizations (e.g. responders in a crisis situation) are key activities in nowadays ecosystems. However, there is a lack regarding formal approaches dedicated to characterize collaborative networks of organizations. Formal descriptions of collaborative situations, that could be used, transformed, computed and exploited would be of great benefit for the quality of such collaborative networks. This article presents a model‐based AI framework for describing collaborative situations and the associated formal metamodel dedicated to be instantiated to characterize collaborative situations in a very wide range of application domains. This metamodel (describing collaborative situation between organizations) is structured according to four complementary dimensions: the context (social, physical and geographical environment), the partners (the involved organizations, their capabilities resources and relations), the objectives (the aims of the network, the goals to be the achieved and the risks to avoid, etc.) and the behaviour (the collaborative processes to be implemented by the partners to achieve the objectives in the considered context). Besides, this metamodel can be extended for some precise application domains. This article focuses on this mechanism in the specific context of crisis management