Home : Research : Projects : GeoCollaborative Crisis Management

The need to develop information science and technology to support crisis management has never been more apparent. Crisis management, for events such as hurricanes, forest fires, disease outbreaks, chemical spills, and terrorist attacks, relies upon geospatial information about the event itself, its causes, the people and infrastructure affected, resources available to respond, and more. Crisis management also relies upon teams of people who must collaboratively derive knowledge from geospatial information and coordinate their subsequent activities. Current geospatial information technologies, however, 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.

Our research addresses two fundamental problems that impede effective coordinated work with geospatial information in crisis management activities.

• First, current geospatial information technologies are hard to use and designed for use by individuals; they do not support group work effectively.
• Second, there is limited scientific understanding of how groups (or groups of groups) work in crisis management using geospatial information and technologies that can range from large screen displays in a command center to PDAs for field personnel.

Agency collaborators include units focused directly on crisis management for natural hazards (chemical, biological, meteorological) and on homeland security as well as units that supply the geospatial information to meet their needs.

• A cognitive systems engineering approach is applied to developing a deep understanding of group work with geospatial information and technology in the context of crisis management.
• The knowledge derived is used to develop advanced, easy to use geospatial technology that supports both same-place and distributed/mobile, dialogue-enabled collaborative crisis management activities.

• Click here for a list of publications

Alan M. MacEachren, Department of Geography

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