A Visual Communication Language for Crisis Management

TitleA Visual Communication Language for Crisis Management
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2007
AuthorsFitrianie S, Rothkrantz LJM
JournalThe International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems
Volume2
Pagination208–216
Date Publishedjun
KeywordsCrisis management system and visual communication language and natural language processing and disaster simulator
Abstract

In crisis situations and decision-making capabilities rely on reports from all parties involved. For achieving the necessary capabilities of crisis technology and a communication-interface prototype representing concepts and ideas has been developed. To support language-independent communication and to reduce the ambiguity and multitude of semantic interpretation of human observers’ reports and the messages are constructed using a spatial arrangement of visual symbols. We developed a dedicated grammar to interpret and convert the visual language messages to (natural language) text and speech. The communication interface also provides an icon prediction to have faster interaction in next icon selections. The system processes the incoming messages to build a world model by the employment of ontology. A blackboard structure in a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network is used to share and distribute information. We deployed our visual language interface in a serious game environment of a disaster and rescue simulator. The current implementation of this environment is capable of simulating real disaster situations using information from human user observers’ reports.

URLhttp://mmi.tudelft.nl/pub/leon/ijics.pdf