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Top1. Introduction
A number of natural disasters across the globe (e.g.) has shown the necessity of organized crisis and response systems that will be able to provide automated ways to coordinate the work of search and rescue teams. The complexity of such systems requires the use of an efficient architecture that will allow the adjustment of the crisis and response system to the specific conditions of a crisis. This architecture will allow the flexible modification of the system according to the requirements of the crisis. In this case, there will be efficient use of resources and exact clarification of the roles of the different users of the system, its capabilities and its limitations. The paper explores different system design architecture and focuses how Service-Oriented Architecture can be used but also improved through a new definition in the context of the ATHENA Crisis Response System.
The ATHENA Project is a European Union project that aims to develop a crisis communication and management system that enables the public to communicate in an ethical and lawful way with the emergency search and rescue services during a crisis. The goal of the ATHENA project is the delivery of two major outputs. The first output is the development of a set of guidelines for the police, Law-Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) and the first responders for the use of social media during crisis situations. The second output is the development of a set of software tools in order to enhance the emergency response options for the search and rescue services using mobile devices in crisis situations. The ATHENA System includes Crisis Command & Control Intelligence Dashboard (CCCID), the Crisis Mobile and the Crisis Information Processing Centre (CIPC). The structure of the ATHENA System is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The structure of the ATHENA system
The Command Control & Intelligence Dashboard (CCCID) has a number of functionalities, such as the real-time crisis monitoring through filtered social media data, the provision of a crisis headlines banner, the provision of crisis statistics and the use of a social content management tool which is used to generate messages through social media. The CCCID is also used for the geo-location of crisis incidents, crowd-sourced reports and key locations such as emergency supplies and medical aid.
The Crisis Mobile is a web service for crisis pre-first responders. It includes the ATHENA Citizen Reporter 'Point & Shoot' system and the Crisis Mobile Receiving Tools. The ATHENA Crisis Information Processing Centre (CIPC) includes the information acquisition and pre-processing tools and the aggregation and analysis tools. The first set of tools includes a social media scanner, a citizen report streaming/recording centre, a speech recognition system, a filter system and a crisis taxonomy system. The second set of tools includes a classification/clearance system, a Formal-Concept Analysis (FCA) system, a data fusion system, a credibility scoring system and a sentiment analysis tool.
The use of the ATHENA CIPC tools allows the real-time acquisition of voice and video messages from crisis-dedicated social media. The filtering of the collected information is based on the use of crisis taxonomies and Twitter hash-tags. The use of text mining techniques (e.g. data fusion, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and rule-based inference) is required for data analysis and aggregation. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is used for the analysis of data that describe the relationship between a set of objects and a set of attributes. FCA has many applications in biological sciences, linguistics, data mining and semantic searching (Domdouzis et al., 2014).
Figure 2 depicts how the components of the Crisis, Command, Control and Intelligence Dashboard interact with all the other ATHENA components. The specific figure shows the complexity of the ATHENA system and the different data flows.
Figure 2. Interaction of components of crisis, command, control and intelligence dashboard with other ATHENA components