Supporting the on-site emergency management through a visualisation technique for mobile devices

In case of emergency, visual analytics applications may be a successful means for quickly organising necessary activities. They allow decision-makers to immediately visualise the status of the crisis, plan the evacuation and address people towards vacancies in emergency centres. Although the effectiveness of such applications is immediately clear, further support may be gained by allowing people to directly manage the emergency on site. In this sense, it seems to be particularly desiderable to provide interfaces which support visual analytics tasks on small and handheld devices without losing their communicative efficacy. In this article, we adopt and extend a visualisation techinque, named Framy, specifically conceived for visualising in a very intuitive way a large number of aggregates on very small devices. In particular, we show how it reveals to be suitable for the management of these kinds of emergencies by embedding and qualitatively aggregating both spatial and temporal information useful for catching status and evolution of events. An example concerning an evacuation scenario shows the Framy extended capability.