The software EBox: Integrated information for situational awareness

This paper describes the development of the “EBox”, a system that provides integrated access to a wide variety of information sources relevant to providing situational awareness during emergency response situations. The EBox exemplifies a novel information integration approach in which both pre-existing data and real-time information streams are obtained from multiple sources and are rapidly and intelligently ingested and registered to faclilitate efficient and integrated access at a later time. We describe the design and development of the EBox, and the deployment experience in a drill and demonstration exercise. We further describe key technical challenges that remain and our ongoing research efforts in addressing such challenges.