User-Centric Information Management for Decision Support in Disaster Relief & Evacuation

Operations oriented to disaster relief & evacuation management usually takes place in a continuously changing environment, what requires application of situation management principles. Context is information that can be used to characterize a situation or an entity where the entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the application themselves. Thereby application of context management technology to disaster relief & evacuation can significantly improve the decision making processes in this area. However, decision making cannot be efficient without user-centric information management. In the presented work the profiling techniques are used for this purpose. Developed user profile model and its application are presented. The model consists of the user context (information used to facilitate the decision support process) and history of the activities. The history is used to reveal tacit user preferences that are included into the user context