MobileEmerGIS: a Wireless-enabled Technology Platform To Support Emergency Response Management

In this paper, the architecture and middleware services of the wireless-enabled emergency response management system MobileEmerGIS are introduced. MobileEmerGIS allows to gather and to distribute multimedia information to and from mobile nodes (either human users or sensors/actors). Thereby, field forces and eye witnesses can transfer data collected in the field, such as pictures from emergency sites, immediately to centrally located decision makers as well as other field forces (using PDA platforms and even their own private mobile phones). While the data collected by the system provides many opportunities for optimizing the coordination of the rescue activities, at the same there is a risk that on-site rescue forces are paralyzed by being overwhelmed with the exponentially growing amount of information. Therefore one of the key capabilities of MobileEmerGIS is that centrally stored data is made available to mobile rescue forces in a highly focused way, for example by applying geopositioning and role-dependent filters. By referencing real-life scenarios (such as a large-scale fire emergency), concrete application services enabled by MobileEmerGIS are presented.