Situation Awareness for Disaster Management in the Information Age

Abstract
Well informed decisions lead to good outcomes.

This article looks at how advancements in information systems affect situation awareness in disaster management.

The article considers the collection of intelligence, the collation of those observations into a common operating picture and distribution of awareness updates in a form that can drive effective action.

The article commences with a review of the information needs of those impacted by disasters and those involved in the larger scale disaster management and recovery processes.

The analysis is used to design an information system that recognizes the operating environment and the information needs of these diverse stakeholder groups.It identifies that the challenges of the physical environment, changes in work focus as we progress through the disaster life cycle and the decentralized nature of disaster management all favour an information system design based around a federation of stand-alone computing components that post information updates to an out-of-area data centre.

Much of the data identified in this study have location as a core element. Information systems that can use geographical location to fuse data from multiple sources are likely to increase the value of these data in disaster management.