A Knowledge Management and Need-Capacity Matching Approach for Community-Based Disaster Management and Recovery

Abstract

Post-crisis response and recovery necessitates the identification and prioritization of the needs and capacities of the affected community in order to provide efficient and well-coordinated humanitarian assistance. The Community Based Comprehensive Recovery platform aims to facilitate enhanced communication flows between professional communities, affected communities, and volunteer responders to enhance situational awareness, inform and guide response planning, and ensure more effective coordination of activities by volunteer responders. Underpinning the platform, an information framework has been designed to support acquisition and analysis of the needs and capacities that arise across affected communities. In addition, a multi-criteria decision making algorithm has been designed and developed in order to enhance sense making and situational awareness within the platform. Subsequently, this paper introduces the core concepts that provide a basis for the information model, along with the associated ontology. Furthermore, the paper presents details of the decision making algorithm in conjunction with results from its application to a representative set of sample data.