Mobile Knowledge Management Support in Fire Service Organisations

In emergency domains like fire services, the need for support systems enabling instant mobile access to mission-critical knowledge from different heterogeneous knowledge sources has increased significantly during the past years. A comprehensive socio-technical study that focuses on the current state of working and on the needs of the people working in fire services was conducted within the European Project AMIRA (Advanced Multimodal Intelligence for Remote Assistance). Based on the results of this study, the AMIRA system was designed, which supports knowledge management by a system that integrates various knowledge sources through an intelligent mediator component called CAKE (Collaborative Agent-based Knowledge Engine). The knowledge can be assessed through multi-modal mobile and stationary clients. The developed system has been implemented as prototype and successfully evaluated in a comprehensive evaluation based on user trials.