Design of Categorization Mechanism for

Disaster-Information-Gathering System

 

Shinsaku Kiyomoto+, Kazuhide Fukushima, and Yutaka Miyake

 

KDDI R & D Laboratories Inc.

Fujimino, Saitama, Japan

{kiyomoto, ka-fukushima, miyake}@kddilabs.jp

 

Abstract


Organizations that are responsible for disaster and emergency management are faced with the issue
of how to gather reliable and useful information during a major disaster. We consider an information gathering platform for large-scale disasters and emergencies based on mobile terminals. A simple solution to realize an information-gathering system is to construct a server where information is uploaded and published. However, such a centralized approach is not flexible nor is it robust. For example, it is very hard to find an appropriate system to which the user can upload information during a disaster, and the centralized server may be down because of overload or because it has been physically destroyed. We must consider a distributed and dynamic architecture for the system. Security and privacy issues are another concern that should be addressed for providing information from user¡¯s mobile terminals. Here, we focus on the design of a categorization mechanism for the information-gathering system. In this paper, we present a mechanism that has been designed so that it is able to accommodate requirements and we then conduct a feasibility analysis of the mechanism.

 

Keywords: security, privacy, information gathering, disaster, categorization

 

+: Corresponding author: 2-1-15 Ohara, Fujimino, Saitama, 356-8502, Japan, Tel: +81-49-278-7885

 

Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA),

Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 21-34, December 2012 [pdf]