On the Design of a Contextual Emergency State Builder with Multiple Data Sources

Emergencies often happen in a random and unexpected way, and operational forces must take immediate actions to reduce damages to the affected properties and people. Contextual information provides emergency response teams with an overview of the ongoing emergency and allows better decision making, such as the coordination of operational forces and resources provisioning. In this paper, we present the Emergency State Builder (ESB), acentral component we designed to aggregate contextual information about emergencies from multiple data sources with emphasis on fires, explosions, gas leaks and environmental damage incidents. The ESB is our answer to the challenge and providing timely, reliable and relevant contextual information to other components of a emergency management platform, called RESCUER, and, ultimately, to the emergency response teams. To illustrate the applicability of this work, we present how the RESCUER Public Communication module (RESCUER News) benefited from the information provided by ESB.