EOM April 2005 > SHARING IN GEOTECHNOLOGIES

Collaborating For Critical Incidents And Austere Environments

Darrell O'Donnell, P.Eng.

At the outset, let's define a few terms . . .

Critical Incident (CI)

a large-scale incident requiring multiple stakeholders (government, non-governmental organizations, and industry) to collaborate in order to mount an effective response.

Austere Environment (AE)

an environment in which there is a risk to personnel and equipment, with the addition of limited, degraded, or failing communications. Risks to personnel in an austere environment may range from natural risks (e.g., flood, aftershocks) to social ones (e.g., crime, terrorism).

Collaboration

a working relationship involving critical individual responsibility and group responsibility with collaborators adding to the value of work of others.

When a critical incident occurs, such as the December 26 tsunami, people all over the world want to help immediately by providing whatever resources they can. The response to the Asian Tsunami has been truly fantastic. Interestingly, a lot of communication was done using Short Message Service messaging (SMS, or text messaging) and Web logs (blogs, personal online journals), because of their low bandwidth usage (SMS) and wide distribution (blogs). It makes one wonder if other technologies and capabilities are being appropriately deployed.

The geospatial community knows the value that its technology can bring, but the real difficulty comes in deploying systems for use in CI/AE situations. The reality is that the reason that printed maps are used is that it is much easier to make a point with a printed map and a marker than trying to use a powerful, but confusing GIS. Geospatial technologies have simply been too difficult to use in the situations that CI/AE create.

It frustrates many people in the geospatial field that when situations degrade such as in a critical incident response or in an austere environment, the non-geospatially aware folks start using paper maps, or they cut and paste screen shots into presentations. What the geospatial community should ask is "Why do they run to paper every time things heat up?" The answer is quite simple: it works. It may not be ideal, but it works well enough that responders may forego extremely advanced geospatial capabilities because of the simplicity of a paper map and a marker, or the familiarity of Microsoft PowerPoint. Geospatial technologies have not evolved far enough to replace this paper and presentation cycle.

Only tightly organized and trained teams have been able to deploy a solution for geospatial collaboration into an austere environment in support of an incident. Unfortunately, the scale of many incidents means that teams are assembled to respond on an ad hoc and transient basis. This more fluid process ebbs and flows as some needs are met and new needs are discovered. It's time for a new paradigm in applying and sharing geospatial technology and a new application of existing geospatial technologies is required.

The following capabilities are the bare minimum for an effective use of geospatial technology in CI/AE.

Start Basic and Constantly Refine
In response situations, time is of the essence. In order to save time, a system should support the ability to start immediately with a basic geospatial capability, perhaps just a simple vector map or a single georeferenced image of the area of interest, or a combination of a few layers. As time goes on, more detail can be brought in, highlighting hot spots or particularly relevant data. Individual team members can add data that brings value to the team — and the situation picture will constantly evolve, meeting the changing needs of critical incidents (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Key data types that are immediately useful in a response situation (from top left, going clockwise): roads (in E00 format); units, markups and incidents from a distributed database; automated briefing items; LANDSAT 7 Imagery from an OGC Web Map Service (WMS).

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