SocialEMIS: improving emergency preparedness through collaboration

The definition of the contingency plan during the preparedness phase holds a crucial role in emergency management. A proper emergency response, indeed, requires the implementation of a contingency plan that can be accurate only if different people with different skills are involved. The goal of this paper is to introduce SocialEMIS, a first prototype of a tool that supports the collaborative definition of contingency plans. Although the current implementation is now focused on the role of the emergency operators, the accuracy of the plan will also take advantage of information coming from the citizens in future releases. Moreover, the contingency plans defined with SocialEMIS represent a knowledge base for defining other contingency plans.