Collaborative situational mapping during emergency response

Abstract

During emergency response, individuals observe only part of the picture, sharing of information is needed to get the required complete picture. The aim of our study is to get insight in the collaborative mapping process in order to derive requirements for a map-sharing tool. First, we analyzed the domain to assess the mapping processes, to identify general problem areas of the assessed processes. Subsequently, we conducted a laboratory experiment to systematically investigate the indentified problem of collaborative map construction by individuals who observed an incident from different perspectives. This paper discuss an experiment, which showed that the individual maps are sometimes better than the jointly constructed map, among other things due to the collaboration biases of unbalanced relations and uncertainty about oneself. Thus based on this experiment, the collaborative mapping tool should support joint map construction and help to prevent the identified collaboration biases. Copyright 2009 ACM.