The need to develop information science and technology to support crisis management has never been more apparent. Crisis management, for events such as hurricanes, forest fires, disease outbreaks, chemical spills, and terrorist attacks, relies upon geospatial information about the event itself, its causes, the people and infrastructure affected, resources available to respond, and more. Crisis management also relies upon teams of people who must collaboratively derive knowledge from geospatial information and coordinate their subsequent activities. Current geospatial information technologies, however, fail to support group work and have typically been designed without scientific understanding of how groups (or groups of groups) work in crisis management to collect, process, and use geospatial information.

Our research addresses two fundamental problems that impede effective coordinated work with geospatial information in crisis management activities.

The objective of the research is to address both of these problems in an integrated way, and do so in the context of real world crisis management activities. We address these problems through two linked research and development activities:

Agency collaborators include units focused directly on crisis management for natural hazards (chemical, biological, meteorological) and on homeland security as well as units that supply the geospatial information to meet their needs. Federal partners include the EPA (four units), HHS-Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, NGA, USGS, NASA (Earth Science Applications Division), Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and the Federal Geographic Data Committee. State partners are the PA-DEP, the Port Authority of NY & NJ, Operations & Emergency Management, and the Florida Emergency Management Agency.

Our industry partner, VideoMining, Inc. will collaborate on technology implementation portions of the research.