Supporting Decision Making during Emergencies through Information Visualization of Crowdsourcing Emergency Data

Decision making during an emergency response requires having the right information provided in the right way to the right people. Relevant information about an emergency can be provided by several sources, including the crowd at the place where the emergency is happening. A big challenge is how to avoid overwhelming the decision makers with unnecessary or redundant information provided by the crowd. Our hypothesis is that appropriate information visualization techniques improve the understanding of information sent by a crowd during an emergency. This work presents an approach for emergency information visualization, gathered through crowdsourcing, which improves context-aware decision making by keeping a real-time emergency state board. This approach was implemented in ERTK, as a proof of concept, and evaluated with 15 emergency management experts in Brazil. The yielded results show that our approach has the potential to assist a context-aware decision making during an emergency response.