Supporting the On Site Emergency Management through a Visualization Technique for Mobile Devices

In case of emergency, visual analytics applications may be a successfull means for quickly organizing necessary activities. They allow decision-makers to immediately visualize the status of the crisis, plan the evacuation and address people towards vacancies in emergency centres. Although the effectiveness of such applications is immediately clear, further support may be gained by allowing people to directly manage the emergency on site. In this sense, it seems to be particularly desiderable to provide interfaces which support visual analytics tasks on small and handheld devices without loosing their communicative efficacy. In this paper, we adopt and extend a visualization techinque, named Framy, specifically conceived for visualizing in a very intuitive way a large number of aggregates on very small devices. In particular, we show how it can reveal suitable for the management of this kind of emergencies by embedding and qualitatively aggregating both spatial and temporal information useful for catching status and evolution of events. An example concerning an evacuation scenario shows the Framy extended capability.