Use of polls to seamlessly collect and aggregate semi-structured information for crisis response

During large-scale crisis situations there is an acute demand for relevant and accurate information. The availability of such information to incident commanders assists the ever continuing need to improve the effectiveness of emergency response through the enhancement of agency preparedness and awareness; this also includes the potential offered by volunteers and the general public as well. To address the above mentioned challenges a distributed platform capable of seamlessly collect and aggregate information from engaged users providing information using the web or mobile devices is proposed. At the same time integration of information from sources such as sensors deployed on incident sites, publicly available open data, corporate legacy systems or documents stored on remote locations is enabled. As a result the platform end users can act based on the results of information aggregation and analysis. The work presented in this paper is motivated mainly by requirements identified by first responders during numerous crisis responses.