Visualization mechanisms for crowdsourcing information in emergency coordination

Abstract

To perform emergency coordination, people in a command centre need to process a large amount of data about the incident to make decisions, generally, under time pressure. A main challenge is to quickly obtain contextual information about the situation, which can be obtained from people in the place of the incident, in a crowdsourcing manner. This paper presents our investigation about visualization mechanisms to support command centres on analysing crowdsourcing information regarding emergency situations. As contributions, we highlight: 1) discussion of existing visualization mechanisms and their support on emergency management; 2) prototype of the Emergency Response Toolkit (ERTK), a set of tools to support command centres on using information from the crowd, e.g. in large-scale events; and 3) evaluation of ERTK and its visualization mechanisms with 11 emergency experts, in Brazil, Austria and Spain, collecting feedback to improve information visualization for emergency management.