Crisis management and context

Successful management of critical situations created by major natural and man-made activities requires monitoring, recognizing, fusing, and making sense of these activities in order to support decision makers in either preventing a crisis or acting effectively to mitigate its adverse impact. Context plays an important role in crisis management since it provides decision makers with important knowledge about current situations and situation dynamics in relation to their goals, functions, and information needs, to enable them to appropriately adapt their decisions and actions. Efficient context exploitation for crisis management requires a clear understanding of what context is, how to represent it and use it. The chapter provides a brief discussion of the key issues of the problem of context definition, representation, discovery, and utilization in crisis management.