Compendium concept demo: emergency response

The EPSRC-funded Advanced Knowledge Technologies Consortium ran 2000-06. The final demonstrator of all the technologies coming together centred on an emergency response scenario. Compendium served as the sensemaking hub around an aircraft crash on London, envisioning how a response coordination team might use Compendium overlaid on a GIS, to keep track of events and actions, in concert with a diverse set of AKT semantic web services.

I’ve just got round to converting the concept movie to a podcast [hi-res version], so here it is, along with an explanatory article…

The Application of Advanced Knowledge Technologies for Emergency Response

http://oro.open.ac.uk/19858

Making sense of the current state of an emergency and of the response to it is vital if appropriate decisions are to be made. This task involves the acquisition, interpretation and management of information. In this article we present an integrated system that applies recent ideas and technologies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and semantic web research to support sense- and decision-making at the tactical response level, and demonstrate it with reference to a hypothetical large-scale emergency scenario. We offer no end-user evaluation of this system; rather, we intend that it should serve as a visionary demonstration of the potential of these technologies for emergency response.