Supporting group work in crisis management: visually mediated human – GIS – human dialogue

Geospatial information is a fundamental component of many crisis management activities. However, current geospatial technologies do not support work by crisis management personnel, most of whom are not technology specialists—a key impediment is that the technologies require the user to learn the system’s <i>language</i>. In addition, geospatial technologies are not ‘collaboration friendly’—they impede rather than facilitate group work. In this paper we address both issues by presenting (1) a theoretical framework for understanding the roles of visual mediation in map-supported human – human dialogues, and (2) a computational approach for enabling such roles in collaborative spatial decisionmaking contexts. Building upon our initial implementation of a map-mediated collaborative environment, the DAVE_G system [a natural, multimodal, dialogue-enabled interface to geographical information systems (GIS)], we model human – GIS and human – GIS – human dialogues as complex visual-cognitive signification processes in which maps become dynamic facilitators. Using a scenario simulating two crisis managers dealing with a major nuclear release event, we demonstrate how visual display (in DAVE_G) actively mediates human – human dialogue directed to situation assessment and action planning in real applications.