Understanding work with geospatial information in emergency management: A cognitive systems engineering approach in GIscience.

摘要

This dissertation seeks to improve the utility of GIS by developing a deep understanding of GIS and geospatial information technologies to provide more suitable interfaces for emergency management centers. To design such interfaces and improve experts' access to GIS, it is important to understand how geospatial information is used in emergency management and crisis decision making. The immediate motivation for this research is to support a larger research effort to make GIS easier to use in emergency management and command and control situations. During emergencies, the standard operational delivery of geospatial information is channeled through GIS specialists, working individually, who provide emergency response managers maps and analyses for damage assessment assistance requests. Efforts have been made to improve the timely delivery of information during emergencies through widespread efforts to deploy geospatial information technologies in emergency management divisions across the country in support of emergency planning, decision-making, management, and response. Still, our understanding of the breadth and depth of geospatial information technologies in emergency and crisis response centers is limited. Recent advances in vision tracking, speech recognition, and interface design have opened the door on the design of multimodal interfaces to GIS. To develop a deep understanding of work with geospatial information, I implemented a three stage, problem-centered study based on theoretical foundations in Cognitive Systems Engineering, Naturalistic Decision Making, and Knowledge Elicitation. The knowledge obtained about current practices was used to create models and envisioned designs of advanced, next-generation geospatial information technologies. In order to provide design assistance, this work focuses on gaining an in-depth understanding of the use of geospatial information during emergency response activities, with specific focus on hurricanes. Improved understanding was achieved by the production of models of crisis decision-making and scenarios of the use of geospatial information during emergencies. A key component of communicating the information was through the creation of real world emergency response scenarios that serve as envisioned designs for more natural interfaces to GIS, new geospatial information technologies, and as representations of work in Emergency Operations Centers. This research suggests that the methods and theories of Cognitive Systems Engineering have the potential to improve both an understanding of work with geospatial information and the subsequent design of advanced, geospatial information technologies.