Secure information sharing and analysis for effective emergency management

Effective incident management and response requires timely and coordinated decision making. 9/11, Katrina and other emergent events demonstrate the need for effective information sharing and decision support at the operational as well as at the strategic levels. There has been significant work on emergency response at the first-responder level. This paper addresses the challenge of integrating, aggregating and securely sharing information to support situation awareness and response at the strategic level. Drawing on data from various autonomous systems, the system uses context-sensitive parameters to filter, integrate, and effectively visualize information necessary to get a common operational picture. One of the challenges is to facilitate information sharing in a secure manner. Information sharing remains a major barrier due to the privacy and ownership concerns on the data, and due to a wide variety of security policies adopted within different government agencies.