Decision management applications (e.g. crisis response) and information structuring and filtering to support decision manager action and training by Bomi Song

The goal of the decision management applications is to develop a tool that better prepares people in an emergency situation to react swiftly and efficiently to a disaster. For attaining this goal, the semantic level information is a key to addressing the problem of information overload on the crisis managers. And there are three kinds of knowledge which must be represented in this domain; (1) Crisis scene and human behavioral data analyzed for higher-level concepts, features, trends, patterns, etc., (2) Disaster/crisis scenario domain knowledge, and (3) Knowledge about crisis workers/managers. With above knowledge, crisis worker/manager request can be used to generate interactive presentations back to the user to assist them in their tasks. We customize the information presentations they are provided in response to requests or events. Our approach is to construct a federation of ontologies to handle the semantic meta-data for each kind of knowledge illustrated in figure 1.

Figure 1. Crisis Manager “Portal”

Our main role in this project has two key aspects:

(1) Analysis and mining event history archive: Using domain ontology, we generate a history archive of events that take place within a given geo-spatial time frame. And monitor decisions and actions taken during an event and review these decisions for future scenarios. And then learn from the previous “similar” encounters. At last, mine histories for novel/problematical patterns using task-domain ontology.

(2) Filtered interactive multimedia presentation with user model: The system is connected to the 3D visualization, which enables the fire commander to assign fire engines to specific fires. And there are more multi-modal information about the fires such as text, image, and so on. The multimedia data presentation will be displayed to the crisis manager in the way allows them to quickly recognize the crisis situation and problem(s). And the presentation will be customized using the user model.