Improving Situation Awareness and Reporting Using the Emergency Response Intelligence Capability Tool
The Emergency Response Intelligence Capability (ERIC) tool automatically gathers data about emergency events from authoritative web sources, harmonizes the information content and presents it on an interactive map. All data is recorded in a database which allows the changing status of emergency events to be identified and provides an archive for historical review. ERIC is used by the Australian Government Department of Human Services Emergency Management team who is responsible for intelligence gathering and situation reporting during emergency events. Event information is combined with demographic data to profile the affected community. Identifying relevant community attributes, such as languages spoken or socioeconomic information, allows the department to tailor its response appropriately to better support the impacted community. An overview of ERIC is presented, including examples of its use by the department and the difficulties overcome in establishing and maintaining a nationally consistent harmonized model of emergency event information.
KeywordsDisaster management Situation awareness Situation reporting System architectures Web feeds
ERIC was funded under the Human Services Delivery Research Alliance between the CSIRO and the Australian Government Department of Human Services. Thanks to the Human Services Emergency Management team for supporting the ERIC work, especially Lucy Knight and John Dickinson. The following CSIRO colleagues worked on the ERIC project: Michael Compton, David Ratcliffe, Bella Robinson, Geoffrey Squire and Catherine Wise. Special note should be made to Catherine and Geoff as the main developers for the tool and Catherine prepared Fig. 3.
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