Understanding the Role of Cooperation in Emergency Plan Construction

TL;DR

This paper proposes a spatial information organization approach for cooperative work in emergency response planning, aiming to improve understanding of cooperation dynamics and information management.

Contribution

It introduces a spatially structured information representation method tailored for emergency plan construction, enhancing cooperation analysis.

Findings

Improved ability to analyze cooperation patterns.

Enhanced information retrieval in emergency planning.

Identification of shortcomings in current cooperation strategies.

Abstract

In this paper we describe a proposal for information organization for computer supported cooperative work, while working with spatial information. It is focused on emergency response plan construction, and the requirements extracted from that task. At the centre of our proposal is the analysis of the structure of the cooperative workspace. We argue that the internal information representation should follow a spatial approach, tying the structure used to manage users with the structure used to manage information, suggesting the use of different spaces to represent the information. The gain we expect from this approach is the improved capacity to extract information on how people are cooperating and their relationship with the information they are working with. The ideas are introduced while focusing on real life emergency planning activities, where we discuss the current shortcomings of the cooperation strategies in use and propose a solution.