Towards a C2 Poly-Visualization Tool: Leveraging the Power of Social- Network Analysis and GIS

摘要

Civil authorities and emergency managers need to collect, manage, analyze and display network and geographic information to understand better the connectivity of critical sectors of the community and their spatial relationships to physical attributes of geography and terrain, the built environment, critical infrastructures and key resources, and the proximity of segments of the population/ neighborhoods to local hazards and threats to security. A promising method for the analysis of social relationships is Social Network Analysis (SNA). Instead of focusing on the individual, SNA focuses on an entity comprised of a collection of individuals and their relationships with each other. This allows practitioners to identify and characterize relevant social networks, to isolate ways to improve community resilience, and to improve the quality and speed of critical decision-making processes during a disaster or emergency. In spite of its promise, the combination of SNA and a Geographical Information System (GIS) into a single tool remains elusive. Hence, a tool to visualize and display organizational and social relationships is needed in communities using a GIS to provide a situational awareness picture that highlights vulnerabilities, strengths, and redundancies within such networks. This paper describes the advantages, barriers, and opportunities involved in creating and using an SNA-GIS tool.