Personalizing situation awareness

Emergency responders need access to information but what counts as actionable information depends on their role, task, location, and other variables. For example, experts who have unique knowledge and experience and are called on to serve as scientific and teclmical responders, require correspondingly unique situation awareness in order to do their work. In our research-in-progress we leverage emerging and evolving web and digital library technologies to create personalized situation awareness tools that address the needs of these scientific and technical responders in real time, through focused information collection, extraction, integration, representation, and dissemination. We describe three personalized situation awareness tools in this paper: the Theme Awareness Tool (THEMAT), Social Awareness Tool (SAT), and Expertise Awareness Tool (EXPAT). The concepts and technologies we are developing in collaboration with experts apply to those who use the Web, in general, and offer an approach to the general issue of HCI design for emergencies