Today, disaster events are mobilizing digital volunteers to meet the data needs of those on the ground. One form of this crowd work is Volunteered Geographic Information. This peer-produced spatial data creates the most up-to-date map of the affected region; maintaining the accuracy of these data is therefore a critical task. Accuracy is one aspect of data quality, a relative concept requiring standards to measure against. The field of Geographic Information Sciences has developed standards for this comparison, achieving widespread acceptance. However, the peer production model of spatial data presents new opportunities—and challenges—to traditional methods of quality assessment. Through analysis of the OpenStreetMap database, we show that temporal editing patterns and contributor characteristics can provide additional means of understanding spatial data quality. Drawing upon experiences from Wikipedia, we offer and evaluate three intrinsic quality metrics of peer-produced spatial data to assess the quality of contributions to OpenStreetMap for crisis response.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most widely used volunteer geographic information system. Although it is increasingly relied upon during humanitarian response as the most up-to-date, accurate, or accessible map of affected areas, the behavior of the mappers who contribute to it is not well understood. In this paper, we explore the work practices and interactions of volunteer mappers operating in the high-tempo, high-volume context of disasters. To do this, we built upon and expanded prior network analysis techniques to select high-value portions of the vast OSM data for further qualitative analysis. We then performed detailed content analysis of the identified activity and, where possible, conducted interviews with the participants. This research allowed the identification of seven distinct mapping practices that can be classified according to dimensions of time, space, and interpersonal interaction. Our work represents a baseline for future research about how OSM crisis mapping practices have evolved over time.

Hurricane Sandy wrought $6 billion in damage, took 162 lives, and displaced 776,000 people after hitting the US Eastern seaboard on October 29, 2012. Because of its massive impact, the hurricane also spurred a flurry of social media activity, both by the population immediately affected and by the globally convergent crowd. In this paper we explore how retweeting activity by the geographically vulnerable differs (if at all) from that of the general Twitter population. We investigate whether they spread information differently, including what and whose content they chose to propagate. We investigate whether the Twitter-based relationships are preexisting or if they are newly formed because of the disaster, and if so if they persist. We find that the people in the path of the disaster favor in their retweeting locally-created tweets and those with locally-actionable information. They also form denser networks of information propagation during disaster than before or after.

Social media and other online communication tools are a subject of great interest in mass emergency response. Members of the public are turning to these solutions to seek and offer emergency information. Emergency responders are working to determine what social media policies should be in terms of their "public information" functions. We report on the online communications from all the coastal fire and police departments within a 100 mile radius of Hurricane Sandy's US landfall. Across four types of online communication media, we collected data from 840 fire and police departments. Findings indicate that few departments used these online channels in their Sandy response efforts, and that communications differed between fire and police departments and across media type. However, among the highly engaged departments, there is evidence that they bend and adapt policies about what constitutes appropriate public communication in the face of emergency demands; therefore, we propose that flexibility is important in considering future emergency online communication policy. We conclude with design recommendations for making online communication media more "listenable" for both emergency managers and members of the public.

This ethnographic study of a Facebook Page founded on 28 October 2012 in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy's US landfall reveals how on-line pet advocates--a large but loosely organized social movement--mobilized their ad hoc discretionary activities to more cooperative, organized work to assist numerous displaced pets. The investigation shows how innovations around 'crossposting' to create a more persistent form of visual data management were important. It describes how these innovations produced an improvised case management system around which members of the pet-advocacy crowd could collectively work to help displaced pets. The paper connects to the CSCW and organizational science literature to consider how this emergent community articulated work and structured the mission of the Page.

Disaster-related research in human-centered computing has typically focused on the shorter-term, emergency period of a disaster event, whereas effects of some crises are long-term, lasting years. Social media archived on the Internet provides researchers the opportunity to examine societal reactions to a disaster over time. In this paper we examine how blogs written during a protracted conflict might reflect a collective view of the event. The sheer amount of data originating from the Internet about a significant event poses a challenge to researchers; we employ topic modeling and pronoun analysis as methods to analyze such large-scale data. First, we discovered that blog war topics temporally tracked the actual, measurable violence in the society suggesting that blog content can be an indicator of the health or state of the affected population. We also found that people exhibited a collective identity when they blogged about war, as evidenced by a higher use of first-person plural pronouns compared to blogging on other topics. Blogging about daily life decreased as violence in the society increased; when violence waned, there was a resurgence of daily life topics, potentially illustrating how a society returns to normalcy.

We examine the public, social media communications of 110 emergency medical response teams and organizations in the immediate aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. We found the teams through an inductive analysis of Twitter communications acquired over the three-week emergency period from 89,114 Twitterers. We then analyzed the teams' Twitter streams, as well as all digital media they generated and pointed to in their streams - blog posts, photographs, videos, status updates and field reports - to understand the medical coordination challenges they faced from pre-deployment readiness to on-the-ground action. Here we identify opportunities for improving coordination in a decentralized and distributed environment where staffing, disease trajectories, and other circumstances rapidly change. We extrapolate from these findings to theorize about how "beaconing" behavior is a sign of latent potential for coordination upon which mechanisms of coordination can capitalize.

Crisis informatics is an emerging research area that studies how information and communication technology (ICT) is used in emergency response. An important branch of this area includes investigations of how members of the public make use of ICT to aid them during mass emergencies. Data collection and analytics during crisis events is a critical pre-requisite for performing such research, as the data generated during these events on social media networks are ephemeral and easily lost. We report on the current state of a crisis informatics data analytics infrastructure that we are developing in support of a broader, interdisciplinary research program. We also comment on the role that software engineering research plays in these increasingly common, highly-interdisciplinary research efforts.

Human experts in scientific fields routinely work with evidence that is noisy and untrustworthy, heuristics that are unproven, and possible conclusions that are contradictory. We present a fully implemented AI system, Calvin, for cosmogenic isotope dating, a domain that is fraught with these difficult issues. Calvin solves these problems using an argumentation framework and a system of confidence that uses two-dimensional vectors to express the quality of heuristics and the applicability of evidence. The arguments it produces are strikingly similar to published expert arguments. Calvin is in daily use by isotope dating experts.

Software engineers confront many challenges during software development. One challenge is managing the relationships that exist between software artifacts. We refer to this task as information integration, since establishing a relationship between documents typically implies that an engineer must integrate information from each of the documents to perform a development task. In the past, we have applied open hypermedia techniques and technology to address this challenge. We now extend this work with the development of an information integration environment. We present the design of our environment along with details of its first prototype implementation. Furthermore, we describe our efforts to evaluate the utility of our approach. Our first experiment involves the discovery of keyword relationships between text-based software artifacts. Our second experiment examines the code of an open source project and generates a report on how its module relationships have evolved over time. Finally, our third experiment develops the capability to link code claiming to implement W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards with the XHTML (eXtensible HTML) representation of the standards themselves. These experiments combine to demonstrate the promise of our approach. We conclude by asserting that the process of software development can be significantly enhanced if more tools made their relationships available for integration.

Emerging software development environments are characterized by heterogeneity: they are composed of diverse object stores, user interfaces, and tools. This paper presents an approach for providing hypermedia services in this heterogeneous setting. Central notions of the approach include the following: anchors are established with respect to interactiveviewsof objects, rather than the objects themselves; composable,n-ary links can be established between anchors on different views of objects which may be stored in distinct object bases; viewers may be implemented in different programming languages; and, hypermedia services are provided to multiple, concurrently active, viewers. The paper describes the approach, supporting architecture, and lessons learned. Related work in the areas of supporing heterogeneity and hypermedia data modeling is discussed. The system has been employed in a variety of contexts including research, development, and education.

Open hypermedia is one approach to managing the relationships that exist in software development projects.A key technical issue in this endeavor is support for scalability.Our experience supporting scalability in open hypermedia has revealed several key insights including the notion of the transitivity of scalability, the need to consider issues of scale in moving from design to implementation, the need to apply multiple techniques in tandem, and the unexpected nontechnical issues that arise when scaling a system to meet the * demands of industrial software engineering.These insights are grounded in observations of a development project that scaled an open hypermedia system, Chimera, two orders of magnitude to meet the demands of an industrial user.

While a large fraction of application code is devoted to graphical user interface (GUI) functions, support for reuse in this domain has largely been confined to the creation of GUI toolkits ("widgets"). We present a novel architectural style directed at supporting larger grain reuse and flexible system composition. Moreover, the style supports design of distributed, concurrent applications. Asynchronous notification messages and asynchronous request messages are the sole basis for intercomponent communication. A key aspect of the style is that components are not built with any dependencies on what typically would be considered lower-level components, such as user interface toolkits. Indeed, all components are oblivious to the existence of any components to which notification messages are sent. While our focus has been on applications involving graphical user interfaces, the style has the potential for broader applicability. Several trial applications using the style are described.

While a large j7action of application system code is devoted to user interface (U[)fi.mctions,support for reuse in this domain has largely been conjined to creation of UI toolkits ("widgets").We present a novel architectural style directed at supporting larger grain reuse andjexible system composition.Moreoveq the style supports design of distributed, concurrent, applications.A key aspect of the style is that components are not built with any dependencies on what typically would be considered lower-level components, such as user interface toolkits.Indeed, all components are oblivious to the existence of any components to which notijcation messages are sent.Asynchronous notification messages and asynchronous request messages are the sole basis for inter-component communication.While our focus has been on applications involving graphical user interfaces, the style has the potential for broader applicability.Several trial applications using the style are described~.

The Chiron-1 user interface system demonstrates key techniques that enable a strict separation of an application from its user interface. These techniques include separating the control-flow aspects of the application and user interface: they are concurrent and may contain many threads. Chiron also separates windowing and look-and-feel issues from dialogue and abstract presentation decisions via mechanisms employing a client-server architecture. To separate application code from user interface code, user interface agents called artists are attached to instances of application abstract data types (ADTs). Operations on ADTs within the application implicitly trigger user interface activities within the artists. Multiple artists can be attached to ADTs, providing multiple views and alternative forms of access and manipulation by either a single user or by multiple users. Each artist and the application run in separate threads of control. Artists maintain the user interface by making remote calls to an abstract depiction hierarchy in the Chiron server, insulting the user interface code from the specifics of particular windowing systems and toolkits. The Chiron server and clients execute in separate processes. The client-server architecture also supports multilingual systems: mechanisms are demonstrated that support clients written in programming languages other than that of the server while nevertheless supporting object-oriented server concepts. The system has been used in several universities and research and development projects. It is available by anonymous ftp.