Overview
VisiRescue is a situational awareness system built on top of the Synergy Infrastructure. We built this prototype for possible use in emergency
operation centers, as part of the Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events (RESCUE) initiative for
disaster response.
Goals
The main goal of VisiRescue is to visually represent data from many different sources, overlaid on a GIS map. We obtained detailed GIS data sets from the Champaign County Geographical Information System (CCGIS) project. The data included road maps, tax parcels, bodies of water, water and sanitation pipe layouts and very high resolution aerial photographs. The information is available as a 26 GB geo-database. We use a ArcGIS front-end to visualize the information.
In times of emergencies, it is useful to gather actual information from data sources close to the region of
interest. Our discussions with the City of Champaign Emergency responders revealed three types of disasters
they expect:
- Natural disasters, e.g. ice storms, tornadoes, straight-line winds
- Industrial disasters, e.g. chemical spills along the railroad
- Man-made disasters, e.g. a terrorist attack
To gather information for, say, a wind storm, sensors can be deployed around the city. Wind speed and direction sensors can provide useful information in real time. There are sensors already deployed in town by the Atmospheric Science Department at the University of Illinois. Also, many organizations and businesses have surveillance cameras which may be useful during disasters. In addition to that, 911 call and location information is handled through METCAD (www.metcad911.org) and can be overlaid on the GIS display.
However, in normal situations, outside access to these resources may not be possible, for confidentiality reasons. For example, there are security cameras located at di®erent locations at the shopping mall, but the mall owners are not likely to allow police to monitor them all the time. Then again, in some special circumstances, the privacy concerns are overcome by security issues, and the mall authority may allow access to qualified emergency response teams. The special circumstances can include a terrorist attack or a tornado.
Traditional authorization schemes are not suitable here, as that would require scaling to a large number of heterogeneous organizations and setting up a priori relationships with them. Also, traditional schemes, or even the new attribute-based systems like Shibboleth, would require large scale changes to the computer systems of the organizations, or require the formation of organizational coalitions. We argue that the Synergy framework is appropriate for this task, because each of the resource owners can set up their own resource access policies, and control negotiated access to their resources. Also, the framework is very lightweight, and can be retrofitted to almost any legacy system.
Screenshots
VisiResCUE ArcGIS front end
Collaboration
Publications
- Ragib Hasan, Marianne Winslett, "Synergy: A Trust-aware, Policy-driven Information Dissemination Framework", IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI 2006), San Diego, USA, May 23-24, 2006. [slides]