Situation awareness and virtual globes: Applications for disaster management

This paper presents research on the use of virtual globes to support the development of disaster event situation awareness in humans via open source information analysis and visualization. The key technology used for this research is the Context Discovery Application (CDA), which is a geovisual analytic environment designed to integrate implicit geographic information with Google Earth™. A case study of humanitarian disaster management is used to demonstrate the unique abilities of the CDA and Google EarthTM to support situation awareness. The paper provides some of the first empirical evidence on the utility of the virtual globes to support situation awareness for disaster management using implicit geographic information. The evidence presented was derived from evaluations by disaster management practitioners at the United Nations (UN) ReliefWeb project, an extremely relevant, yet difficult group to access for conducting academic disaster management research. Finally, ideas for future research on developing virtual globe applications to support situation awareness are described.