Project highlight: GeoCollaborative crisis management

The major natural disasters that occurred in the last few months have shown the importance and necessity for collaborative, international crisis management. Current geoinformation technologies are potentially powerful tools for mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery tasks in crisis situations; however, they 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. The GeoCollaborative Crisis Management (GCCM) project investigates how groups utilize geospatial technologies in crisis situations and uses findings to design novel, multimodal (speech and gesture-based), collaborative interfaces for geospatial technologies.