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Who What Where When (W3) Emergency Response Coordination
Current W3 Model
W3 Details
One of key questions in emergency response is Who is doing What Where and When. We use this as a framework in our brainstorm session to highlight some of data requirements and challenges in emergency response.
- Who = what organisations (and people) are working (and how to contact them)
- What = what type of activities being undertaken (at a project level)
- Where = where those activities are being undertaken.
Who
We need to keep track of all organizations and coordination centers involved in an incident. Information about mission of the organizations - overall and in the context of an incident, their capabilities, and their current responsibilities can support situational awareness and time-boxing required for emergency operations. In this context, we identified the following organizational contact information:
- Unique Identifier
- Phone
- Email (create virtual domain?)
- Means of communication/contact/availability
- Role (same as mission?)
- Service Area - geographical
- Established Locations
- Credentials (forms part of Governance)
- Functional/Legal/other responsibilities
- Status (Active/Inactive, Available/Unavailable)
- Clearance/Dependency
Of note, although the focus here is on organizational entities, local efforts by persons affected are not often captured in existing data models.
Other issues:
- Information inherited from organisational relationships
- What is the means to identify, locate, contact the Who
- Under what circumstances?
- Expectations
What
The activities that the organizations perform are mainly emergency support functions (ESF) (ETc??), transportation, and evacuation. The key point in such activities is the ability to assess the needs, and to address and integrate available resources versus capabilities. The activities can be characterized as following:
- Service/Activity
- Domain
- Coverage
- No of people covered or required
- Capabilities
- Categories
The type of disaster/incident will also determine (or give a good indication of) the range of Whats that should be provided. These activities would be applied to respond and recover from the incident.
Where
There is no single frame of reference to locate people or resources. Some use identifiers (such as place names), coordinate reference system (CRS), or jurisdiction for this purpose. Some humanitarian information centers use universal indicators such as p-code instead. One of challenges is to map among geographical ontologies.
Other issues:
- geographical governance constraints/requirements
- jurisdictional boundaries
- infrastructure access (roads, cities, facilities, addresses)
- demographics
- effort to deliver, protect, obtain, distribute services and resources
- accountability to make resources/services available
When
The incident can be described by the following properties:
- Instance
- Range and periods
- State
- Phase of an event
- calendar time
(What about the activities timeline??).
On validity and interoperability issues
The information comes from data inputting and external sources. Validity of such information is an important issue. Some assign a degree of confidence to the data and often use different frames of reference to assign probabilities. Veracity of the information is sometimes questionable as well. Interoperability is another concern. As mentioned before, there are different geographical frameworks to locate things. The other factors affecting interoperability are as following:
- Sensitivity
- Privacy
- Access control/rights
- Validity
- Security (e.g., data encryption)
- Uniqueness (applies especially to missing persons, perhaps not to other data?)