CT2CM 2012 - 2nd Track on Collaborative Technology for Coordinating Crisis Management

In crisis situations (natural or industrial disasters, riots, ...), the different actors managing crisis resolution have to act simultaneously in emergency situations to reduce its impacts on the real world. To achieve this common goal as quickly and efficiently as possible, these actors (police, military forces, medical organizations, NGOs but also emerging groups) have to collaborate and act in a coordinated way. In the term ‘coordination’, we include all the work needed for the actors, for the connected integration of their information systems and also for the flexible synchronization of their efforts, in order to handle the crisis in the most efficient way.
Coordination raises several problems such as the definition of the universe of discourse, without which it would be impossible to solve the various semantic conflicts that are bound to occur between several autonomous and heterogeneous actors and their ISs. It involves the finding of partners, emergent partners integration, their collective decisions, partners plans negotiation and the synchronization of the distributed and concurrent execution of their actions and plans.
Moreover, in a highly dynamic, open, unstable and uncertain environment, such as the one met in crisis context, coordination should be redesigned to be more reactive, pro-active, adaptive, robust and visible for all the partners while preserving the essential part of their autonomy. It is intended that this track should focus mainly on the benefits of adopting collaborative enabling information technologies such as: Agent based-systems, Collaborative BPMS, Semantic Web or Group Decision Support Systems (DSS).
This track will try to address the following issues: how can collaborative information technologies help with the coordination of Crisis Management ? It is meant to cover the foundations, techniques, methodologies and applications of Collaborative Information Technologies for Coordinating Crisis Management. The track is interdisciplinary in nature and open to contributions from fields as varied as Cooperative Information Systems, Multi- Agent Systems, Business Process Management and the Semantic Web.
Track topics
Topics include, but are not limited to:
Cooperative Information Gathering and Situation Awareness,
Social Networks (media, citizens, ...) observations,
Crisis Ontology,
Adaptive and self-organization of the crisis management teams,
Information System Interoperability and Inter-organizational issues,
Group decision support,
Crisis process design, enactment and adaptation,
Agent models for : negotiation, trust, resource allocation, planning and acting collaboratively,
Crisis Management Systems.