Emergency information Synthesis and awareness using E-SOS
Linn Marks Collins, James E. Powell, Carolyn Dunford, Ketan K. Mane, Mark L. B. Martinez · International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management · 2008
In an emergency, people need to be able to report and find relevant information quickly. Fulfilling these information needs is the design goal of E-SOS: Emergency Situation Overview and Synthesis, a research project in progress. ESOS will consist of (1) a website where users can report information, (2) web services that find and synthesize related information from multiple sources, and (3) interface tools that visualize and display links to this information. In this paper we describe three of these services and tools: the topic, geographic, and information space awareness tools. When a user writes a report, the topic awareness tool will execute a federated search and display links to related information. The information space awareness tool will highlight these links in a visualization of the information space. If the user refers to a location, the geographic awareness tool will focus a map on this location and display topic-related icons.