Toward a flexible service-oriented reference architecture for situational awareness systems in distributed disaster knowledge management

The aim of our research is to develop methods for authorities to improve situational awareness in support of management activities in disasters and catastrophes. One of the objectives is to anticipate, collect and analyze requirements for advanced situational awareness information systems and use them to define a free and open source based reference architecture for a flexible service oriented system designed to support the loose connection of the situational awareness systems of different authorities. This task is a very demanding one, because the interfaces of the legacy information systems of the different authorities are typically closed, their age, technology and position in their lifecycle are very different and they are mainly intended to support only certain types of activities (rescue, firefighting, police work, health and emergency, safety, etc.). Additional challenges for requirement elaboration include the special characteristics of the information needed in different phases of the emergency management cycle (mitigation & prevention, preparation, response and recovery), quantitative and qualitative differences in situational awareness needs (i) at local versus global level and (ii) between different types of authorities (rescue, police, health etc.), and (iii) the type of management decision (tactical, operational or strategic). This paper deals with the challenges in collecting and managing the information and knowledge needed for the development of situational awareness in disaster and catastrophe management.