Shareable Technology Mash-Up for Situation Awareness in Catastrophic Events

This paper offers a descriptive account of the use of a shareable mash-up of technologies designed to create situation awareness during catastrophic events. In particular, we focus on the exploratory use of technologies for information aggregation and sharing between public and private sector entities during a national emergency simulation--National Level Exercise 2011. The goal of this research is to seek a proper way to integrate ubiquitous technologies such as Twitter, Google Earth Map, and Person Finder to share situation updates as well as monitor resource allocation during response to a catastrophic event. We implement an emergent use of micro syntaxes on feeds from Twitter to facilitate coordination of efforts among responding agencies. This paper concludes with a discussion of several implications for design based on our findings that may be beneficial to crisis management as well as other domains.