The safety innovation center had the opportunity to present first work results from the EU project LINKS (“Strengthening links between technologies and society for European disaster resilience”) at this year’s ISCRAM conference (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management), which took place virtually from May 23-26, 2021. The ISCRAM community is an international community consisting of researchers, policy makers and practitioners working on the development and deployment of information systems in crisis management.
With the scientific paper “A Consolidated Understanding of Disaster Community Technologies (DCT)” the safety innovation center presented the creation of a classification schema for disaster community technologies (the so-called DCT-scheme). DCT are programs and applications that can be used in crisis situations for communication and coordination of and information gathering from communities. This can be done passively, such as with social media data analytics, or actively, such as by coordinating volunteers. For example, monitoring news and images from the public about a crisis event would be a crucial help for civil emergency response organizations. This would give the organizations the opportunity to create a faster and more comprehensive picture of a crisis situation.
The aim is to simplify the use of such technologies for potential stakeholders in civil security with a structured collection of information such as the scope of functions and to enable the selection of suitable systems.
The Horizon2020 project LINKS, launched in June 2020, aims to understand and assess impacts of social media and crowdsourcing on European resilience to disasters. Through sustained learning, this will strengthen the links between technologies and society for improved European resilience.
More information about the ISCRAM conference: https://www.drrm.fralinlifesci.vt.edu/iscram2021/index.php
More information about the EU project LINKS: http://www.links-project.eu/
Image source: safety innovation center gGmbH