Semantic Geotagging: A Location-Based Hypermedia Approach to Creating Situational Awareness

As emergency first responders and commanders increasingly use mobile phones, tablets, and social media to communicate, coordinate, and manage information during disasters, we see a need and opportunity to provide a mobile device-appropriate semantic layer to a geographically-based common operating picture. The challenge is to provide a simple, usable structure for a rapidly growing body of information to simplify the development of situational awareness in an unfolding disaster. We use a hyperlinked structure based on the ASK model to organize information in a readily accessible form. In this paper we describe our initial design and experience with an Android-based prototype, supported by a Ruby on Rails-based repository service. Our prototype allows the incorporation, aggregation, assessment, and redistribution of dynamic human-generated and sensor-derived information.