[Asis-l] Information Overload in Emergency Preparedness and Management

[Murray Turoff]

Opportunity for Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems,
Collaborative Tagging, Text Mining, and other IS professionals

CALL FOR PAPERS, SESSION ON

Reducing Information Proliferation and Overload in Emergency Management

ISCRAM 2008, Washington DC, May 3-5, Session ID: HCI-04  See:
http://iscram.org for submission details

Session Chair:
Murray Turoff (message me if you have questions on the session topic)
turoff at njit.edu  http://is.njit.edu/turoff

Motivation:
Where is the information I need?
Where is the knowledge I should have?
Where is the wisdom I wish I had?

With apologies to T.S. Elliot, the above might well express the
desires of practitioners in Emergency Management or Business
Continuity.  The crux of the problem today is that there is an
unbelievable amount of documents, reports, message lists, and sites on
the web in this field and that it is growing far faster than any
single individual can deal with or feel confident that they have not
missed something important.

Currently on the Web, using a simple Google search for "emergency
management" or business continuity" we find over 9 million items.
Those following this field are seeing hundreds of new items a week
pass by in various lists, newsletters, announcements, etc..

Research Area:  The objective of this session is to request papers on
proposed methods to reduce information overload in Emergency
Management with a specific approach that has been applied to at least
a sample of data currently on the Web.  These techniques can include
information retrieval methods and those approaches to allow
individuals or Communities of Practice to better filter, organize,
structure, and/or recommend quality or relevance of the material on
this subject.

Topics: Examples include, but are not limited to, indexing methods,
ontology methods, collaborative tagging, theme detection, recommender
systems, knowledge structures, use of tailored agents, extraction
methods, clustering methods, standards, etc.  We are interested in
existing or new methods for locating the most relevant and high
quality information, applied specifically to the topic of emergency
management or business continuity.  We will also consider as papers
for this session case studies by or about practitioners on what they
face today as information overload and how they currently cope with
it.

Type of contribution:  Methodological approaches to reducing
Information Overload or Case Studies of information overload in
Emergency Management
Academic Session: we invite researchers from academia or research labs
to present their research or research-in-progress papers. Prospective
presenters submit a regular research (or research-in-progress) paper.
Practitioners or academics may also present case studies of
information overload.

Important ISCRAM 2008 Dates:
   December 21, 2007: Paper submission deadline
   February 10, 2008: Notification of (conditional) acceptance
   February 22, 2008: Early registration deadline
   March 1, 2008: Final camera-ready paper submission deadline
   May 4-7, 2008: ISCRAM 2008

About ISCRAM:  The ISCRAM Community is a worldwide community of
researchers, scholars, teachers, students, practitioners and policy
makers interested or actively involved in the subject of Information
Systems for Crisis Response and Management. At its annual
international conference alternating between the US and Europe, the
ISCRAM Community gathers to present and discuss the latest research
and developments in this growing area during an interactive and
stimulating 3 day program. The ISCRAM Community also organizes an
International Summer School for PhD students and ISCRAM-CHINA, an
annual conference for ISCRAM research in China. All information on
ISCRAM can be found at http://www.iscram.org
ISCRAM 2008 will be held from 4-7 May at the George Washington
University (GWU) located in Washington, DC, USA. The conference will
be hosted by GWU's Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management
(ICDRM). All details on this conference are available via the ISCRAM
website mentioned above.