Using Shared Procedural Knowledge for Virtual Collaboration Support in Emergency Management

This paper describes a framework that allows the collaborative development and deployment of procedural knowledge for task support in emergency situations. In this framework, procedural knowledge is represented in a wiki using an informal, textual description that is marked up with formal tags based on the representation for hierarchical task networks used in AI planning. Procedural knowledge in the wiki can be used for task support by way of enhanced browsing facilities and the planning capabilities of an HTN planner. The latter supports the automatic composition of procedures to form plans for specific tasks. The tight integration of collaborative editing with deployment is new in this system and advances knowledge engineering for planning domain knowledge, that is, procedural knowledge. An experimental evaluation has shown that the explicit availability of procedural knowledge in emergency situations can reduce procedural uncertainty.