On-Demand Information Portals for Disaster Situations

This paper describes our work on developing technology for rapidly assembling information portals that provide integrated access to and analysis of information from multiple sources in the case of any disaster. Many recent disasters (the S.E. Asian Tsunamis, the London subway bombings, the Katrina hurricane, to name a few) have demonstrated that a lot of valuable information becomes available in the hours and days immediately following the disaster, and such information is indeed valuable to disaster managers or even citizens in their response. In this paper we describe our work on developing information portals for disasters in general; we describe many key information processing capabilities and challenges that we consider important in such portals and also describe our approach to developing such capabilities.