Situation awareness and virtual globes: Applications for disaster management

There is an additional paper about the software evaluation.The evaluation studies were conducted with ReliefWeb. ReliefWeb is a United Nations (UN) funded project managed through the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).CDA-processed documents are listed in the Google Earth legend, the contents and structure of which are determined by the CDA. Legend items contain folders for thematic and geographic references organized by scale (country, state, county, town etc.) found. Information is structured this way by the CDA to provide a disaster manager with interactivity over the display of thematic references and entities by geographic scale. For example, a disaster manager may only want to view counties referenced in documents. Term frequency within a document determines the height a term is rendered in 3D space.The following section provides empirical evidence, derived from a utility study and focus group discussion with disaster management practitioners, of the benefits and drawbacks of the virtual globe capabilities of the CDA to support situation awareness for disaster management.

Tool development and evalutation

Software Development:Implicit information processing functions of the CDA are based on the use of geocoding algorithms, automated reasoning procedures, and disaster ontologies to extract geographic and thematic references from web documents referenced from real simple syndication (RSS) feeds. RSS feeds are used as a primary information source as they are an increasingly used format for web content publication and are easy to access computationally due to their XML structur.Upon retrieving an RSS feed, results found by the CDA’s geographic text extraction and geocoding process are rendered in KML and presented in Google Earth using a network link object connected to the CDA information processing server.If an origin point is established, connection line thickness indicates the frequency of place references in a document. The geographic scales of entities found (country, city, county, town etc.) are represented using point symbol shapes. Line and point transparencies indicate how old a document is relative to when the KML was created by the CDA.These visual encoding strategies are used to help disaster managers to remove potentially irrelevant or unneeded information by providing a quick information overview through visual cues.

Are virtual globes helpful to develop situation awareness

Future work includes a formal comparison between virtual globe and non-virtual globe (such as a 2D map) environments of the implicit information visualization approach presented in this paper to establish strengths and weakness of both types of approaches. Such a comparison was not possible for the research presented in this paper due to time constraints posed by the limited availability of the UN evaluators whose feedback was deemed critical for evaluating the virtual globe aspects of the approach.A disadvantage of RSS is that a feed’s contents may not be representative of the entirety of a web site’s contents, thus providing only a partial view of available content. In the following section, a case study of disaster situations in the Sudan is presented to illustrate the CDA.

Virtual globes can provide the geographic–social context that facilitates geo collaboration—or collaborative processes that are conducted and mediated through geographic information and knowledge.In addition to situation awareness of real world events, participants in any type of group work need to maintain awareness of collaborative activity. Examples of activity awareness include but are not limited to (a) a sense that other collaborators are ‘‘there’’ (social awareness) and (b) what relevant information is known by other collaborators. Activity awareness is important for overall situation awareness as it can influence the activity of collaborators in a given situation.Maps play a critical role as visual mediums to support development of situation awareness in humans. Virtual globes, as a next generation of mapping technology, provide an exciting new direction for supporting situation awareness in disaster management. In particular, virtual globes offer powerful visualization methods, interactivity, geographical context and ease of use that can be utilized for informed decision making tasks critical to effective disaster management. Results of these evaluations indicate the approaches presented offer a promising new direction on the use of virtual globes for situation awareness, disaster management and related research at the intersection of geographic information science and information retrieval.

A case study of humanitarian disaster management is used to demonstrate the unique abilities of the CDA and Google Earth to support situation awareness. The paper provides some of the first empirical evidence on the utility of the virtual globes to support situation awareness for disaster management using implicit geographic information.