Facilitating situation assessment through gir with multi-scale open source web documents

Abstract

In this paper, we present our preliminary work on a Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) system that utilizes loosely coupled web services and Google Earth™(GE) to retrieve, extract, combine, and visualize situation information from multi-scale, open source web documents. Our intent with this work is to support situation assessment in the crisis management domain through tools that link and geographically contextualize information contained in text documents retrieved from multiple sources. In particular, our present work focuses on combining two data sources - The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Situation Updates and Google News"™.