Visualizing Composite Knowledge in Emergency Responses using Spatial Hypertext

Abstract

Having the right information at the right time is crucial to make decisions during emergency response. To fulfill this requirement, emergency management systems must provide emergency managers with knowledge management and visualization tools. The goal is twofold: on one hand, to organize knowledge coming from different sources, mainly the emergency response plans (the formal knowledge) and the information extracted from the emergency development (the contextual knowledge), and on the other hand, to enable effective access to information. Formal and contextual knowledge sets are mostly disjoint; however, there are cases in which a formal knowledge piece may be updated with some contextual information, constituting composite knowledge. In this paper, the authors extend a knowledge framework with the notion of composite knowledge, and use spatial hypertext to visualize this type of knowledge. The authors illustrate the proposal with a case study on accessing to information during an emergency response in an underground transportation system.