Information Integration for Emergency Management: recent CSIRO case studies

The CSIRO ICT Centre’s Information Engineering Laboratory has been involved in a number of emergency management related projects over the last four years. In these projects we have applied our software engineering expertise in the areas of web technologies, user interfaces and databases along with research capability in machine learning, distributed systems, text processing and data stream management. This process has increased our understanding of the various roles and responsibilities of different government departments at the federal and state level and of the wider emergency services community. The research agenda of the CSIRO is broad and its application to the area of disaster management is no different. In this field of research, one of the CSIRO’s aims is to improve the process and service delivery of disaster management in Australia and to provide high-impact solutions to strengthen the disaster resilience of the nation in the future. As well as the projects reviewed in this paper, there are other research activities underway or completed within the CSIRO that address the issues of disaster management, see Hawkins et al. (2012) for an overview. The focus of this paper is to present three recent CSIRO projects related to emergency management, highlighting their differences and similarities with a focus on the challenges encountered and a categorisation of the target data items utilised. The Pilot Impacts Portal, http://www.fend.org.au/, is a web accessible user interface to a collection of national data items describing historical fire emergency and natural disaster events and their associated impacts. The project was a collaboration with Fire & Rescue NSW that aimed to better understand the economic, social and environmental impacts on communities due to disaster events. The Emergency Response Intelligence Capability project, http://eric.csiro.au/, is a collaboration with the Australian Government Department of Human Services Emergency Management team who are responsible for intelligence gathering and situation reporting during emergency events. The CSIRO have developed a tool that supports the department’s operational tasks by automatically gathering data from a range of sources, presenting the data on a map based website and generating customised situation reports. The Emergency Situation Awareness system, https://esa.csiro.au/, analyses Twitter messages to provide early detection of emergency events. It extracts situation awareness information as the disaster unfolds, effectively crowd sourcing relevant details and providing time critical information that allows emergency services to respond rapidly and appropriately. A short overview of each project is presented. Each system makes use of different types of information: historical archives, community details, near-real-time authoritative event information and social media content. Combining all of this information will provide emergency management organisations with better quality information for decision making resulting in improved community outcomes. Social media is a new channel of information that can provide further intelligence about emergency events. Authoritative information is being published on Twitter by the emergency services community which can be augmented with non-authoritative crowd sourced social media content to provide a better understanding of emergency events.