Improving emergency management DSS through the CAP protocol: The case study of the italian national fire service

DSS is commonly intended as a computer-based information system that supports business or organisational decision-making activities. Such definition implies the capacity of a DSS of analysing and processing data generated or communicated by multiple sources. A DSS developed to help a civil protection or a fire service Authority should be fed by data and information provided not only by the citizens to emergency numbers, but also from any other organisation involved in the rescue process as well as by available sensors networks, from simulation tools using such data and from the wealth of information provided by GIS data services. Experiences gathered in the course of recent emergencies involving either large areas or very high numbers of people have shown that, even in recent years, the coordination of rescue activities rarely, if not never, was able to take advantage from ICT tools. The main obstacles to data exchange are political attitudes and lack of interoperability services. As a consequence, whenever an uncommon scenario demands such data exchange, the resulting political pressure brings to either exchange data anyway, through improper (and potentially risky) means, or to avoid such data exchange (and miss the related advantages). The sole possibility to overcome such situation is to reach an agreement between the different authorities, aimed at converting and exchanging data in a common protocol, which can be read by non homogeneous systems. Such solution has been tested in Italy in several real-life situations: L'Aquila earthquake (2009), summer forest fire season (2009), Venice local emergency management (2008 - today) and in several well aimed exercises in Europe and U.S.A.