Design of Categorization Mechanism for Disaster-Information-Gathering System
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 informationgathering 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.