Traditional information systems for crisis response and management are centralized systems with a rigid hierarchical structure. Here we propose a decentralized system, which allows citizens to play a significant role as information source and/or as helpers during the initial stages of a crisis. In our approach different roles are assigned to citizens. To be able to designate the different roles automatically our system needs to generate appropriate questions. On the basis of information theory and a restricted role ontology we formalized the process of question generation. Three consecutive experiments were conducted with human users to evaluate to what extent the questioning process resulted in appropriate role determination. The result showed that the mental model of human users does not always comply with the formal model underpinning the questions generation process.
In this paper we present an experiment which has been performed to validate a pragmatic-based, expert-based and basic-level ontology. These ontologies were created for use in an application which generates questions for ordinary people with the purpose to determine a crisis situation. All three ontologies have specific characteristics related to their method of creation. This experiment shows that using the basic-level ontology results in the fastest and least ambiguous determination of a crisis situation.
MULTIFILE
We investigate whether the automatic generation of questions from an ontology leads to a trustworthy determination of a situation. With our Situation Awareness Question Generator (SAQG) we automatically generate questions from an ontology. The experiment shows that people with no previous experience can characterize hectic situations rather fast and trustworthy. When humans are participating as a sensor to gather information it is important to use basic concepts of perception and thought.
