Using SOM in the performance monitoring of the emergency call-taking system

The collaborative emergency call-taking information system in the Czech Republic forms a network of cooperating emergency call centres processing emergency calls to the European 112 emergency number. Large amounts of various incident records are stored in its databases. The data can be used for mining spatial and temporal anomalies, as well as for the monitoring and analysis of the performance of the emergency call-taking system. In this paper we describe a method for knowledge discovery and visualisation targeted at the performance analysis of the system with respect to the organisation of the emergency call-taking information system and its data characteristics. The method is based on the Kohonen Self-Organising Map (SOM) algorithm and its extension, the Growing Grid algorithm.