A Visual Communication Language for Crisis Management

In crisis situations, decision-making capabilities rely on reports from all parties involved. For achieving the necessary capabilities of crisis technology, a communication-interface prototype representing concepts and ideas has been developed. To support language-independent communication and to reduce the ambiguity and multitude of semantic interpretation of human observers’ reports, the messages are constructed using a spatial arrangement of visual symbols. We developed a dedicated grammar to interpret and convert the visual language messages to (natural language) text and speech. The communication interface also provides an icon prediction to have faster interaction in next icon selections. The system processes the incoming messages to build a world model by the employment of ontology. A blackboard structure in a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network is used to share and distribute information. We deployed our visual language interface in a serious game environment of a disaster and rescue simulator. The current implementation of this environment is capable of simulating real disaster situations using information from human user observers’ reports.