Multi-tier-based Global Awareness - A Model for Collaboration in Distributed Organizations and Disaster Scenarios

Collaboration in temporal and spatially distributed environments has consistently had to deal with the challenge of intense awareness, extensively more than locally concentrated team play. Awareness means being informed, in conjunction with an understanding of activities, states and relationships of each individual within a given group as a whole. In multifarious offices, where social interaction is necessary in order to share and locate essential information, awareness becomes a concurrent process that amplifies the exigency of easy routes for personnel to be able to access this information, deferred or decentralized, in a formalized and context-sensitive way. In special cases that become increasingly contemporary, ambulance personnel and rescue forces need to get a vast overview of the current situation, resources available at present and courses of action. Although the subject of awareness has immensely grown in importance, there is extensive disagreement about how this transparency can be conceptually and technically implemented. This paper introduces a model in order to visualize and navigate such information in multi-tiers using semantic networks, GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and Web3D. Moreover the model is used for creating scenarios; for an evaluation from a business organization´s perspective, as well as from a scientific perspective on disaster recovery.