RESCUE Disaster Portal Overview

The Disaster Portal is an easily customizable web portal and a set of component applications for bidirectional communication between response organizations and the public during disasters and emergency situations. Current features include a situation overview with maps, announcements and press information, emergency shelter status, and tools for family reunification and donation management.

The Disaster Portal is easily customized to meet the different needs of the various organizations deploying it. System administrators can select which applications to make available for a particular deployment of the Disaster Portal, and it is also possible to add new content or application modules. The Disaster Portal provides programming interfaces which allow it to be integrated with other IT systems in order to incorporate external data feeds or to publish Disaster Portal content to other systems.

In September of 2007, the Disaster Portal project’s community development partner, the City of Ontario, officially debuted the system. Shortly thereafter the system saw significant use by the city during the October Southern California wildfires. During the fires the system received over 50,000 hits and was used to post more than 20 announcements with maps, emergency sheltering status information, and to notify media organizations of new updates. Success of the system deployed at the City of Ontario has led to interest from a number of additional cities, and discussions are ongoing to coordinate these additional deployments.

The Disaster Portal was created by Project RESCUE as part of its mission to significantly enhance the decision-making capabilities of first responders, response organizations, and the public in the context of a crisis by providing timely and seamless access to accurate, reliable, and actionable situational awareness information derived from multiple sources and modalities. In addition to the Disaster Portal, which provides a general portal framework targeted towards local governments and their communities, the RESCUE team has also developed the Tsunami Portal, a system which can be used to monitor a single, large-scale incident. More information about this project can be found at the Tsunami Portal project website.

Major Features of the Disaster Portal

Situation Summary The Situation Summary component of the Disaster Portal aggregates information from all the other application modules to provide a quick overview of the evolving situation. It also provides users with the ability to quickly link to the details.
Announcements / Map Annotations Announcement messages with associated map annotations indicate various types of incidents (fire, hazmat, etc.) Announcements are created by an administrative user and can be formatted with rich text. The administrative tool supports creation of map annotations either as points, with a designated symbol icon, or as a polygon defining a geographical area.
Alerts and Notifications The Alert and Notification system provides support for automatic generation of alert messages driven by predefined policies which can be customized based on the context and user profiles. Registered users may specify their preferences for when and how they will receive the notifications. The City of Ontario uses the Alert and Notification system to disseminate incident information posted by emergency dispatch center to media contacts via alphanumeric pager and email.
Emergency Shelter Information A database of emergency shelter locations and facility information created and maintained by an administrative user, and a user interface displaying current status of shelters, locations, etc. for public users.
Family Reunification Database of displaced person information collected via this Disaster Portal deployment. Forms allow creation of "looking for you" information requests as well allowing a displaced person to provide contact information (ie from a kiosk set up in an emergency shelter). This enables community participants to communicate with response organizations. Additional capabilities for searching other web sources of displaced person information are under development.
Donation Management Allows users to post both requests and offers of donations in a categorized scheme. A keyword search capability is provided to assist in finding matches. A mechanism is provided to allow the administrative user to highlight certain requests (eg. items urgently needed by the city). Additional capabilities for automatic matching/prioritization of requests and notifications of matches are under development.
Press Releases Document attachments of press releases.
User Profile Management Allows users to create and maintain profiles with email address (for announcements), locations (for customization of content), etc. Information profiles are available to each of the applications deployed in the Disaster Portal.
Site Administration Area Secured area of site which allows designated administrative users to log in and maintain content displayed.

Research Incorporated into the Disaster Portal

The development of the Disaster Portal is based on two primary considerations. While we aim to provide practical applications and services of immediate utility to citizens and emergency managers, we also strive to significantly leverage many relevant pieces of IT research within the RESCUE Project. The advanced technologies that are currently incorporated into the Disaster Portal include components for customizable alerting, family reunification, scalable load handling, unusual event detection and internet information monitoring.

Crisis Alert / RAPID - The Crisis Alert dissemination system can automatically create customized notification messages for a set of recipients who may be affected by a disaster or emergency situation based on administrator defined rules. These messages can be delivered via a variety of modalities including email, text messaging, and the RAPID peer-to-peer system also developed by RESCUE. The Crisis Alert system is utilized in the Disaster Portal for broadcasting messages such as press notifications and announcements.

Family Reunification - One planned addition to the Disaster Portal family reunification application is the ability to provide integration of crawling and/or searching of other missing person information sources on the web so that the user can effectively search many sites at once. This and related improvements will utilize results of ongoing research into issues such as crawling, information extraction, data uncertainty, data lineage, approximate query processing on text, and management of structured and unstructured data using the same infrastructure.

P2P Web Server - Flashback is an experimental web server which creates and utilizes a peer-to-peer infrastructure to address the problem of flash crowds overloading a traditional web server. Flashback is being integrated into the Disaster Portal to allow it to be deployed on typical web server hardware yet still remain effective during high-demand periods as might be expected during a disaster.

Traffic / Population Prediction - This project utilizes activity modeling in conjunction with live roadway loop sensor data from CalTrans to provide information on current traffic patterns as well as predictions of near future conditions. A demo covering a limited geographical area was completed. Current efforts are being made to extend these models to track movements of populations in a given area.

Multimodal Content Processing and Mapping The portal takes in a variety of sources including text based content, images, video, and relational data. Some of this data may be tagged with spatial and other contextual information. In addition, for text based content, this application module can automatically create a semantically enriched representation of data by automatically extracting spatial and other contextual features. Such an enriched representation enables advanced search capabilities as well as map based visualization of the content.

Deployments and Demos

Ontario, California


Ontario, California (Demo)

Rancho Cucamonga, California (Demo)

Aliso Viejo, California (Demo)

Rancho Santa Margarita, California (Demo)

City of Orange, California (Demo)

Contact Information

For more information about the Disaster Portal, please contact:

Sharad Mehrotra
Director, RESCUE Project
University of California, Irvine

Naveen Ashish
Research Scientist, RESCUE Project
University of California, Irvine

Jay Lickfett
Software Engineer, RESCUE Project
University of California, Irvine