Managing a Smart City's Resilience to Ebola: An Ontological Framework

Managing information is central to a smart city's capability to resile. Novel threats, such as the fear of an Ebola epidemic in a city like Dallas, USA pose unique challenges to managing information. The city's approach has to be systemic and systematic -- it cannot be fragmented and incremental. However, the recent responses of cities like Dallas, New York, and Chicago show the difficulty of marshaling an effective response. The combinatorial complexity of managing information is a major source of the difficulty. We present an ontological framework to logically deconstruct the complexity of a smart city's resilience when it encounters such novel threats. We illustrate the application of the framework to planning and assessment with examples from a US county's recent response to Ebola.

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