Building a flexible common operational picture to support situation awareness in crisis management.

Decision support systems for emergency management tend to focus on making a lot of data meaningful to particular users via a common operational picture (COP). This paper describes one such system, but one that goes further by making the COP flexible enough to support multiple users. Large crises involve frequent role switching between different actors in a response. Hence, predicting the support needs of a given user of a COP is difficult at best, complicating the design process. The solution described here is to use interactive information overlays to enable different users to fit the COP to their particular SA needs. The design was evaluated in two user workshops and a demonstration. In general, it was well-received, but domain experts cautioned that the tool must be usable not only in large crises but in everyday operations, or else it will not be used.