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Coordinating emergency response by competent teams
Authors: Danilo Hasse, Fernando A. O. Gauthier, Carlos Roberto De Rolt and Gisiela Hasse Klein
Number of views: 301
ICTs and social networks can contribute to the emergence of creating competent teams for emergency
response. For example, during disasters such as Pakistan flood of 2010, Japan tsunami of 2011 and
Thailand flood of 2011, On-Line Social Networks (OSNs) have served as a main technology for
numerous people seeking to share information about their personal status, to request resources, or to
report the status of their community. They can be used at least for three main functions: detecting
emergencies, disseminating information, and managing emergencies. On the other hand, the combination
of Internet and mobile technology generated smart devices with associated sensor technologies that are
becoming crucial parts in delivering supports during disaster and emergency situation. However, such
use of mobile devices usually requires a reliable support system from crowdsensing technologies and
back-end intelligent systems. In this way, the mobile crowdsensing must be designed with focus on
mechanisms to identify and localize survivors and first responders in an incident zone, as well as
mechanisms for competence characterization provided by social networks to facilitate coordination for
individuals as well as crowds. These main technologies, the crowdsensing and social networks combined
with semantic web and ontologies can provide a complete emergency response system that is the purpose
of the CO-SEMIWA platform. This platform permits an interaction among participants to create
dynamically competent teams where all participants perform tasks and solve problems in a specific
emergency context and situation.