THE CHALLENGE

In the event of a disaster, the authorities and organizations entrusted with safety and security tasks are under a great deal of time and performance pressure to keep the effects of the event as low as possible and to avert further damage. In this context, valid information about the situation in the affected areas must be obtained as quickly as possible in order to make optimal decisions. At the same time, the need for information for the media and the population increases abruptly and disproportionately. Also due to the increased need for protection and security, valid information must be generated and officially released under enormous time pressure. On the one hand, this can create trust and, on the other, counteract any information vacuum that may arise. This can prevent an unmet need for information from increasing the risk of false information being spread.

Social media, instant messaging services and similar modern communication types and channels offer a way to exchange information in a real-time and bidirectional manner and can be used on a wide variety of end devices without any additional effort. To date, however, no solutions or concepts exist for integrating such open sources and channels into existing management systems.

THE PROJECT

iLiKe deals with the design of an intelligent situational awareness portal, which should make open source sources and channels usable for disaster management. In the course of iLike, the requirements from the perspectives of the different stakeholders are collected. This encompasses expert interviews with employees of authorities and organizations with security tasks (BOS) as well as an empirical study to determine the information needs of the population. For this purpose, socially representative focus groups in selected regions are used.

Based on the derived functional and non-functional requirements, modular solution concepts for the selection, extraction, processing and visualization of relevant information from open data sources are designed. Moreover, it is investigated to what extent the use of social media in the context of public relations can be supported by such a service. In addition to the technical aspects, the organizational, social, as well as legal and security-relevant aspects of the dissemination of information is taken into account. In order to ascertain the benefits of the project results and to ensure their potential for exploitation, essential modules are implemented in the form of a proof-of-concept and tested and evaluated together with the users. In the process, emphasis is always placed on a high degree of integrability into existing command and control systems. This is ensured through cooperation with the manufacturer of the Austria-wide standardized operational command and communication system.

Project Coordinator

Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Information Systems, Graz University of Technology clemens.gutschi(at)tugraz.at

Project partners

Institute for Empirical Social Research (IFES) GmbH
Federal Ministry of the Interior Austria
CrowdSense B.V.
Intergraph Ges.m.b.H.
Austrian Center for Law Enforcement Sciences, Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Universität Wien