Context-awareness in crisis management

Successful management of critical situations created by major natural and man-made activities requires monitoring, recognizing, and making sense of these activities in order to support decision makers in either preventing a crisis or acting effectively to mitigate its adverse impact. Context plays an important role in crisis management since it provides decision makers with important information about current situations and situation dynamics in relation to their goals, functions and information needs, to enable them to appropriately adapt their decisions and actions. Efficient context exploitation for crises management requires a clear understanding of what context is and how to represent and use it. The paper represents an attempt to answer these questions by providing a discussion of the key issues of the problem of context definition, representation, discovery, and utilization in crisis management.