Supporting collaborative sense-making in emergency management through geo-visualization

In emergency management, collaborative decision-making usually involves collaborative sense-making of diverse information by a group of experts from different knowledge domains, and needs better tools to analyze role-specific information, share and synthesize relevant information, and remain aware of the activities of others. This paper presents our research on the design of a collaborative sense-making system to support team work. We propose a multi-view, role-based design to help team members analyze geo-spatial information, share and integrate critical information, and monitor individual activities. Our design uses coordinated maps and activity visualization to aid decision-making as well as group activity awareness. The paper discusses design rationale, iterative design of visualization tools, prototype implementation, and system evaluation. Our work can potentially improve and extend collaborative tasks in emergency management. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.