GeoCollaborative crisis management: Designing technologies to meet real-world needs

Preventing, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from natural and human-induced disasters all require access to geographically referenced information and tools for making available information relevant to the tasks at hand. Goals of the research summarized here are to advance our scientific understanding of how groups (or groups of groups) work with geospatial information and technologies in crisis management and to use that understanding to guide development of tools that are intuitive for nonspecialist users and that enable coordination within and across crisis management teams. This overview highlights progress on: understanding work in crisis management, enabling distributed information access through context-mediated geo-semantic interoperability, extension of natural, multimodal interface methods to mobile devices, development of a collaborative map-based web portal to support international humanitarian relief logistics, and technology transition into real-world practice. We also introduce our new DHS-supported Regional Visualization & Analytics Center, which builds directly upon our GCCM work.