Common information space as enabler for collaboration in disaster management: Demonstration of the validity of the EPISECC CIS concept

Interoperability of all actors involved in crisis and disaster management is an imperative pre-requirement for minimizing damage and losses in case of incidents. In order to enhance the opportunities of improved information exchange between involved stakeholders, the EU Commission funded the FP7 project EPISECC. The main objective of EPISECC is to develop a Common Information Space (CIS) designed to enable seamless information exchange between different practitioners involved in European crisis and disaster management. The concept of the CIS ensures that the organizations participating in the information processes can continue to use their proprietary IT solutions applied for crisis management. Unobstructed information exchange between IT solutions of different origin can be realized by developing an adaptor to the CIS only once. Such an approach reduces complexity in a considerable way. For instance, in case of 5 interacting organizations the CIS concept requests to develop 5 adaptors instead of 20 interfaces in case of interfacing each of the 5 tools on a bilateral way. In addition, with the EPISECC CIS, it is possible to semantically annotate exchanged messages as well as to set up subgroups of participating organizations in order to manage different types of incidents in parallel. This ensures that messages are only shared between the organizations involved in the management of a specific event. Within this paper the main features of the EPISECC CIS are illustrated. In addition, the successful Proof of Concept (PoC) of the project that took place in Palmanova, Italy in May 2017 is described.