Supporting unstructured activities in crisis management: A collaboration model and prototype to improve situation awareness

In this paper we explore the construction of Situation Awareness using a collection of mobile, collaborative and visual-interactive devices. These devices provide a shared workspace where multiple users may correlate information about the problematic situation at hand and organize the unstructured activities necessary to handle the situation. A PDA prototype of these mobile, collaborative and visual-interactive devices has already been developed with the purpose to evaluate the feasibility of the collaboration model. The paper describes the collaboration model and presents an application scenario in the emergency management area currently being used to evaluate the prototype.