Supporting Effective Human Interactions with Geographic Information during Crisis Response

Human society is vulnerable to various crises, ranging from hazardous exposure, natural disasters (hurricanes and forest fires), to organized terrorist attacks threatening national security. Although geographical information are widely applied to critical decisions for crisis management, recent field studies have shown that GIS are rarely used by crisis managers at the time of actual crises, because they do not address the special needs of crisis managers. This paper responds to the above problem through integrating two aspects of work. First, we articulate the unique requirement of crisis management GIS applications, which is summarized into three dimensions: timely delivery of information; relevancy to the task at hand; and collaboration-friendliness. These requirements are subsequently used for constructing critics to current desktop GIS and for deriving principles guiding the choice of interface design features. The second aspect of this work is to present a feasible technical solution to the identified design challenges. In particular, we describe two of our own research prototypes, DAVE_G (Dialogue-Assisted Virtual Environment for Geoinformation), and GCCM (GeoCollaborative Crisis Management). DAVE_G addresses the needs for same-place real-time collaboration with geographic information (suitable for emergency operation centres), while GCCM deals with the challenge of supporting distributed crisis management teams. Both systems feature the use of human communication modalities (speech/gesture), conversational dialogues, and visually-mediated collaboration. We compare and contrast such systems with traditional desktop GIS.