76 Int. J. Space-Based and Situated Computing, Vol. 1, No.

1, 2011

A next generation emerging technologies roadmap

for enabling collective computational intelligence in
disaster management

Nik Bessis*
School of Computing and Mathematics,
University of Derby,
Kedleston Road, Derby, DE22 1GB, UK
and
Department of Computer Science and Technology,
University of Bedfordshire,
Park Square, Luton, LU1 3JU, UK
E-mail: n.bessis@derby.ac.uk
E-mail: nik.bessis@beds.ac.uk
*Corresponding author

Eleana Asimakopoulou
Department of Computer Science and Technology,
University of Bedfordshire,
Park Square, Luton, LU1 3JU, UK
E-mail: eleana.asimakopoulou@beds.ac.uk

Fatos Xhafa
Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics,
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona,
Campus Nord, Ed. Omega, C/Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034, Spain
E-mail: fatos@lsi.upc.edu

Abstract: Much work is underway within the broad next generation emerging technologies
community on issues associated with the development of services to foster synergies and
collaboration via the integration of distributed and heterogeneous resources, systems and
technologies. In previous works, we have discussed how these could help coin and prompt future
direction of their fit-to-purpose use in various real-world scenarios including but not limited to
disaster management, healthcare, vehicular networking and knowledge cities. In this exploratory
paper, we brief and then build upon our previous works and specifically, we present a roadmap
highlighting the possible use of next generation emerging technologies for enabling collective
computational intelligence in managing disaster situations. A relevant scenario is used to
illustrate the model architecture, as well as to detail the proposed roadmap.

Keywords: collective computational intelligence; ad-hoc mobile networks; grids; clouds;

crowds; collaborative; pervasive; sensors; situated computing; disaster management; knowledge
cities; smart environments; next generation emerging technologies; roadmap.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bessiss, N., Asimakopoulou, E. and
Xhafa, F. (2011) ‘A next generation emerging technologies roadmap for enabling collective
computational intelligence in disaster management’, Int. J. Space-Based and Situated Computing,
Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.76–85.

Biographical notes: Nik Bessis is a Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computer
Science and Maths, University of Derby, UK. He is also associated with the Department of
Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire, UK. His research interests
include grids, clouds, Web 2.0, crowds and collective intelligence. He is involved in and leading
a number of funded projects in these areas. He has published numerous papers, served as a
Committee Member, Conference Chair, Book Editor and the Editor-in-Chief of the International
Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies.

Eleana Asimakopoulou holds a first degree (University of Luton, UK), an MA in Architecture

(University of Westminster, UK) and a PhD in Managing Natural Disasters using Grid
Technology (Loughborough University, UK). She is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the

Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 A next generation emerging technologies roadmap for enabling collective computational intelligence 77

Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Bedfordshire, UK. She is
an Editor of a book, Workshops Chair and a regular Reviewer in several international
conferences and journals. Her research interests include emergency management, response and
planning for disasters, business continuity, construction and risk management, and also advanced
ICT methods (such as grid, clouds and other forms of applicable collaborative and distributed
technologies) for disaster management.

Fatos Xhafa is currently an Associate Professor (with tenure) at the Technical University of
Catalonia, Spain. His research interests include parallel and distributed algorithms, combinatorial
optimisation, distributed programming, grid and P2P computing. He has widely published in
international journals, books and conference proceedings in these research areas. He serves the
EB of nine peer-reviewed international journals and has also guest co-edited in several
international journals. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Space-Based and
Situated Computing, Inderscience. He has served and is currently serving as the PC
Co-Chair/General Co-Chair of several international conferences and workshops.

1 Introduction response” (Bui and Lee, 1999). Moreover, recent emergency

There is clear evidence demonstrating the growth of
impact – on the society – from disasters (Asimakopoulou
and Bessis, 2010). The massive concentration of population
in hazard-prone areas or in cities and settlements where
houses or infrastructures are not safely constructed or where
land use is poorly planned lead to disastrous effects after an
earthquake, even at a low scale. UN (2005) points out that
an increase in the world’s population causes also an increase
in the density of population within an area, which in turn
increases the impact and loss to human life, infrastructure
and economy. In the EU alone, 494 disasters occurred
between 2000 and 2007, claiming over 79,000 lives. The
economic cost of these disasters is estimated at €103 billion,
or approximately €15 billion per year. The statistics are
even more sobering at global level. Since 1975, the annual
number of disasters worldwide has increased from 75 to
400. Disasters claim on average 85,541 lives per year and
affect some 230 million individuals. Oxfam predicts that
this figure could grow by more than 50% by 2015 to an
average of 375 million affected by climate-related disasters
every year. There is growing recognition among EU
Member States of the imperative to work together on the
prevention of, preparedness for and timely response to
disasters occurring on their territories (EU, 2010).
In managing a disaster, it is apparent that a number of
teams and individuals from multiple, geographically
distributed organisations (such as medical teams, civil
protection, police, fire and rescue services, health and
ambulance services, etc.) will be required to communicate,
cooperate and collaborate – in real time – in order to take
appropriate decisions and actions (Graves, 2004; Otten et
al., 2004; Asimakopoulou, 2008). “The need for information
exchange during an emergency situation is present; however
it can be very diverse and complex” (Carle et al., 2004).
Carle et al (2004) also report that “there are frequent quotes
regarding the lack and inconsistent views of information
shared in emergency operations”. There are many small
communities that “do not have the resources, personnel and
expertise to develop a set of requirements to assist them in
managing their activities as they pertain to emergency
management approaches are also characterised as inefficient
because of their “unstructured poor resource management
and centralized nature with fixed hierarchical instructions”.
Many scholars in the field also point out that for the
management of emergency response operations, a number
of ICT and relevant collaborative computer-based systems
have been developed to assist the requirements of many
segmented organisations to bring together their intellectual
resources and the sharing of accurate information in a
timely manner (Howard et al., 2002; Graves, 2004).
However, report findings from National Resources Services
(NRS, 2006) suggest that sustained efforts should be made
with respect to data and resource archiving, sharing and
dissemination. NRS (2006) refers to it as the “hazards and
disaster research informatics problem that is not unique to
this research specialty, or other fields but it demands
immediate attention and resolution”.
Naturally, information collection is one of the most
crucial issues when managing disasters. This is due to the
need for decisions to be done on a timely fashion, as well as
based on correct and up to date information
(Asimakopoulou et al., 2009; Bessis, 2009; Asimakopoulou
and Bessis, 2010). Our view here, is that managing disasters
should not be seen as a single sub-system, but reflect, rather,
systemic outcomes that result from the combined interaction
of multiple sub-systems at different levels, where a
sub-system may refer to a single communication means or
to an event. It is our view that there should be a pervasive
approach in investigating, acting on, controlling and
managing the vast complexity of events and information
related challenges occurred during any of the four phases of
disasters (mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery).
Thus, our motivation and challenge here is to pose the
question: how are we going to enable disaster managers
with the facility of exploring combined collections in a
meaningful manner or simulation results that are defined
across a broad range of ad-hoc, spatial and/or temporal
scales?
One of the challenges for such a synergetic facilitation
is that of computational, instrumentation and data resource
integration, which aims to provide seamless and flexible
78 N. Bessis et al.
access to multiple autonomous, distributed and heterogeneous
sources through various interfaces. The aforementioned
combination, geographic distribution of users and resources,
and computationally intensive analysis results in complex
and stringent performance demands that, until recently, have
not been satisfied by any existing computational and data
management infrastructure (Foster et al., 2001). Rather,
various technologies have been developed to address the
issue of collaboration, data and resource sharing.
Most of these emerging technologies developed with the
view of producing frameworks and standards to fully or
partially – yet purposefully – support resource integration
within heterogeneous distributed environments. Emerging
paradigms and their associated concepts highlighting their
benefits include but are not limited to Web Services, Web
2.0, mobile and wireless communications, pervasive,
situated, grids and cloud computing and most recently,
crowd source computing. Their goal as individual
computational technologies is to enable an approach
relevant to a combined and collective resource utilisation
and thus, enhance multi-user participation in functioning as
a coherent unit through the use of a cyber infrastructure
(CI). That is, to purposefully work together, collaborate and
solve a problem of mutual interest from a multi-disciplinary
point of view. For example, the Chile mine rescue
(McLaughlin, 2010) required the collaborative effort of a
diverse body of experts including health officials, medical
doctors, engineers, workers, psychologists, rescue and
submarine experts. As such, they typically enable the
provision of shared and often real-time access to, centralised
or distributed resources, such as applications, data, toolkits
and sensors.
As mentioned in our previous works (Asimakopoulou
and Bessis, 2010; Bessis et al., 2010), disaster managers are
required to know where people are and be able to measure
the present and projected impact: there is no real benefit in
sending operational units (OU) to a place if there is no one
actually there; equally, there is great benefit in sending in
OU to a place not considered at a great risk if someone
injured is there. As someone may realise, it is easy to
construct many plausible scenarios where knowledge can be
collected from various emerging technologies to the benefit
of the disaster managers and the society. That is to say,
access to shared information about the number, whereabouts
and health of people in an area struck by a disaster will
significantly enhance the ability of disaster managers to
respond timely to the reality of the situation. The
aforementioned challenge is so vast and multifaceted that it
is clearly insufficient to address all of them here.
With this in mind, the pursued objective in this paper
involves the development of a visionary yet realistic
roadmap, which should foster the evolvement of the
scholarly community researching on the utilisation of next
generation emerging technologies towards the improvement
of the collective computational intelligence in disaster’s
management decision-making. On a similar vein, the paper
will start off with presenting a disaster management
scenario to use as the means to highlight the requirements
for data collection in managing disasters (Section 2). In the
same section, we brief a model architecture highlighting
technologies’ suitability and applicability. In Section 3, we
offer an overview highlighting how next generation
emerging technologies fit into the broader picture of IT
followed by our proposed technical roadmap, which
describes proposed next generation emerging technologies
suitability and applicability and how they fit-for-the-
purpose. Finally, in Section 4 we conclude with future steps
and challenges.
2 Related work: a disaster management scenario
We present here a previously published (Bessis et al., 2010)
and fictional yet typical disaster management case scenario,
which is used throughout the remainder of the paper as a
case.
In an urban area a major earthquake of some significant
magnitude on the Richter scale has occurred. The area is
highly populated and characterised by multi-storey
buildings, such as blocks of offices, malls and other public
buildings. The occurrence of the earthquake caused a
disastrous situation, as some of the buildings have collapsed
and some people have been injured and trapped. Further to
this, a number of secondary phenomena follow the
occurrence of the main hazard, such as electricity failures,
fires and a series of aftershocks. The area’s civil protection
department has organised the emergency operation in order
to respond to the disaster. According to the area plans and to
the emergency calls that reach the emergency services, OU
including rescue teams, engineers, health officials and
medical doctors have been sent on site to locate, support and
rescue earthquake victims. The members of these
individuals and teams have to work as a unit and to report
back to their operation centres about their status and
progress. OU members and experts have to find ways to
reach trapped victims within the collapsed buildings. This
process is dangerous, as the stability of the affected
structural elements cannot be easily assessed. Further to
this, the fact that aftershocks with different magnitudes and
without lead-time occur in the area makes these attempts
more difficult and dangerous. For example, imagine that
while members of an OU-1 are inside an affected multi-
storey block of offices an aftershock occurs, which in turn
results in some of the already affected structural elements of
the building collapsing. Our assumption leads to a realistic
scenario whereby some OU-1 members are injured and
trapped inside the building alongside the originally trapped
victims. Other OUs (e.g., OU-2 or OU-n) and the operation
centre do not know the condition of OU-1 members: if they
are alive, seriously injured, as well as their exact condition
and location. The scenario yields even more uncertainties,
increased workloads, pressures and problems, as other OUs
have to locate and rescue their OU-1 colleagues, help assist
in rescuing victims meant to be rescued by the OU-1 team
as well as deliver their original rescue plan (issued to them
prior to the aftershock) without compromising more lives.
Rescuing OU-1 members is considered a top priority as
 A next generation emerging technologies roadmap for enabling collective computational intelligence
these now-victim members are valuable personnel with
significant immediate value and irreplaceable expertise in
rescue operations.
3 Multi-layer model architecture
Figure 1 illustrates our previously published low-level
model architecture (Bessis et al., 2010). This shows the flow
of interactions between computational devices capable of
sensing the environment and establishing an ad-hoc mobile
network.
Figure 1 A low-level flow
Source: adapted from Bessis et al. (2010)
In brief, the flow takes into account that during a disaster
(such as of an occupational hazard) we could usefully
leverage various distributed emerging technologies to
visualise the status or conditions of victims who have
trapped in a structurally damaged building. Specifically, we
may expect someone who last saw a victim could inform
about relative positioning and/or condition of a trapped
person using Web 2.0 tools.
Assume that every member of an operational rescue unit
wears a plaster that records data about individual health
condition, as well as devices that sense the environment. We
also assume that trapped rescue team members who are in
good enough condition to do so could disperse one or more
sensors so they can start collecting relevant data about the
environment over a range for which their own sensor and
plaster could not function and/or detect. We also assume
79
that buildings could have installed sensors and finally, we
assume that victims could have installed sensor APIs on
their mobile devices. However, we do appreciate that the
latter APIs would be limited in data transfer as well as in
detecting and capturing a variety of signs.
Figure 2 A next generation emerging technologies model
architecture for managing disasters
Source: adapted from Bessis et al. (2010)
In this way, a trapped OU-1 member’s sensor could detect
other sensors available in the environment; and this would
create and establish a limited ad-hoc network, which will
enable communication between mobile APIs, sensors and
plasters with the view to transferring data across networks
residing outside the building. Finally, we suggest the use of
grids and clouds for data processing and storage, as well as
the use of collective intelligence tools including complex
event processing for their meaningful analysis. Complex
event processing works on the event – condition – action
(ECA) logic and it is particularly useful for analysing the
80 N. Bessis et al.
complexity of multi-criteria that could lead to trigger an
alert. For example, certain levels of combined smoke and
temperature could imply a fire or, a complete change of
sensors’ positioning in a building could imply a change in
the building structure. Another example is described in
Bessis et al. (2010), where we explain that certain values of
an earthquake magnitude, the population density and the
type of building construction (building resistance to
earthquakes) could lead to an alert trigger.
Figure 2 illustrates a more detailed model architecture
demonstrating how these next generation emerging
technologies relate and impact in realising, making sense of
and ultimately enabling a more informed decision-making
based on the actual situation rather than a speculative
analysis. The model appreciates that each member from the
virtual organisation (VO) community may have a different
domain of specialisation, which requires taking into account
when managing disasters and occupational hazards. In other
words, like the technologies that have been developed with
the view of complementing each other, limitations of
individual members and their infrastructure may be satisfied
from any other member. Since neither everybody nor any
technology can perform all tasks, a group encompassing
different resources, support technologies and individuals
may be utilised in a manner, which will collectively cover a
much larger domain.
4 Moving from theory to practice: a roadmap
The purpose of the roadmap is to offer the basis for
improved and focused collaboration between stakeholders
including researchers and practitioners from disaster
management and computing disciplines. Its primary aim is
to identify a set of realistic technologies, which will be
compliant with disaster management procedures, policies
and legislation in order to enable an improved collective
computational intelligence in disaster’s management
decision-making. In turn, the collaborative effort should
foster synergies towards the identification of common
ground for realising, capitalising and taking advantage of
the opportunities during the current decade.
Our rationale for the road-mapping process involves the
adaption of the well-known three phases process (Garcia
and Bray, 1997) including the preliminary activity,
development of the technology roadmap, and follow-up
activity. Specifically, the three phases for road-mapping
involve the:
Phase 1 Preliminary activity
a Identification of stakeholders
b Identification of stakeholders’ requirements
c Definition of the scope and criteria for
success for the technology roadmap
Phase 2 Development of the technology roadmap
a Identification of technologies available for
their adaption
b Recommendation of a cutting-edge set of
technologies for its adaption
c Prompt the development of future
technologies as required
d Creation of the technology roadmap
Phase 3 Follow-up activity
a Pilot recommended technologies against
success criteria
b Critique and validate pilots
c Review and update the technology roadmap
d Develop plan and large-scale
implementations
e Loop aforementioned activities
Our methodological approach for the development of the
roadmap suggests a non-linear, flexible backward or
forward transition between phases from one activity stage to
another bypassing stages. The approach allows a revised
stage outcome. For example, someone could follow a path
from Phase 1(c) to Phase 2(a), and then move back to
Phase 1(b) prior to Phase 2(b) or move forward from
Phase (2)b to Phase 3(a) prior to Phase 2(c).
4.1 Phase 1: preliminary activity
In this phase, the emergency management stakeholders must
identify requirements in which a technology roadmap can
help them improve the situation of concern. This process is
iterative and as the roadmap evolves, stakeholders must
ensure that legislation, policies, standards and quality of
service (code of practice) are met to their fuller satisfaction.
Primary research findings indicate that emergency
management stakeholders include the civil protection,
police, fire and rescue services, health and ambulance
services, engineering sector, utility companies, local
authorities, central government, relief bodies armed forces,
monitoring, research and observatory centres and
humanitarian organisations.
In Asimakopoulou (2008), interviews with emergency
managements stakeholders show clear evidence of the
following needs:
• emergency management authorities stakeholders to
work remotely and collaboratively in order to plan,
control, coordinate and communicate relevant actions in
a more effective and efficient way
• stakeholders to dynamically receive the most up-to-date
information of what is the current situation (upon
request)
• stakeholders to dynamically receive the most up-to-date
information in relation to what resource is available to
use (upon request)
 A next generation emerging technologies roadmap for enabling collective computational intelligence
• stakeholders to work in an environment that is free of
any ICT compatibility problems
• ICT resources to dynamically collect, store the most
up-to-date information of what is the current situation
• ICT resources to dynamically assess and allocate
incomplete jobs to other available resources if they
become unavailable
• ICT resources to interoperate in a compatible way
• all resources to dynamically and collaboratively work
in an environment as defined by the set of policies.
Requirements: It has also been identified that emergency
management stakeholders require the:
• ability to allow decision makers to request, access and,
assess information from various sources (including
resources, external experts and instrumentation) related
to a situation under alert
• ability of various sources to collect information about a
situation
• ability to store information in one or more repositories
• ability of authorised decision makers to plan and decide
an appropriate action plan to tackle the situation based
on what is available on them
• ability to alert authorised decision makers if there is a
situation that requires attention (including when an
action plan decided is considered incorrect, incomplete
or even if more resources are required)
• ability to send the job plan to relevant and available
resources (including OU)
• ability of resources or OU to use allocated resources to
take action once job plan has been received
• ability of resources to take a job on demand
• ability of OU to report back of the job status including
cases when more resources are required
• ability of emergency management authorities and
resources to set up a code of practice in the form of a
set of policies (including ethics and body of law).
It is our view that the aforementioned findings stand as a
pilot activity of the preliminary stage for identifying
the stakeholders, their requirements and success criteria.
Thus, further engagement with emergency management
stakeholders is required. The proposed engagement will
fully update pilot findings in which a commonly agreed
shared vision amongst stakeholders can be developed. It is
also believed that the proposed approach could lead to the
identification of good practices in the sector, the
identification of common problems and challenges and
development of a clear roadmap describing what needs are
to be solved.
81
4.2 Phase 2: development of the technology roadmap
In this phase, primary research findings as shown in
(Asimakopoulou, 2008) indicate a number of technologies,
which are suitable to advance the decision making of
disaster managers. Prior to the recommendation of a draft
roadmap, some pilot testing has been performed and this is
briefly described in Phase 3 (see Section 3.3).
On this basis, Table 1 provides an indicative overview
and thus, it describes the kinds of questions that are
relevant, the kinds of possible answers and technologies that
could support the production of our proposed draft roadmap.
Table 1 is primarily focused on data related issues and it has
been produced in a compatible manner with Figure 5. The
latter is the result of a brief overview of next generation
emerging technologies and this is presented next.
• Grid computing: Grid computing have been described
as the infrastructure and set of protocols to enable the
integrated, collaborative use of distributed
heterogeneous resources including high-end computers
(nodes), networks, databases, and scientific instruments
owned and managed by multiple organisations
(Foster et al., 2001). The concept of grid technology
has emerged as an important area differentiated from
open systems, clusters and distributed computing
(Bessis, 2009). Specifically, open systems remove
dependencies on proprietary hardware and operating
systems, but in most instances are used in isolation.
Unlike conventional distributed systems, which are
focused on communication between devices and
resources, grid technology leverages of computers
connected to a network, making it possible to compute
and to share data resources. Unlike clusters, which have
a single administration and are generally geographically
localised, grids have multiple administrators and are
usually dispersed over a wide area. But most
importantly, clusters have a static architecture, whilst
grids are fluid and dynamic with resources entering and
leaving. In brief, grid can be viewed as a dynamic,
enabling paradigm supporting synchronous and
asynchronous resource utilisation in a c-cube mode
(communication, co-operation and collaboration) and it
has been purposefully developed for solving well-
known scientific problems (mainly by academic
researchers) (Bessis, 2010).
• Web services: On the other hand, web services aim
to provide a service-oriented approach to distributed
computing issues, whereas grid arises from an
object-oriented approach. That is to say, web services
typically provide stateless, persistent services whereas
grids provide state-full, transient instances of objects
(Bessis, 2009). In fact, emergence of web services with
grid computing has resulted in a service-oriented
architecture for the grid. An important merit of this
(grid) model is that all components of the environment
can be virtualised, a feature, which points to what is
currently known as cloud computing.
82 N. Bessis et al.
• Cloud computing: Various approaches and definitions
of cloud computing exist (Winton, 2005; De Assuncao
et al., 2009; Bessis, 2010; Schubertt et al., 2010). All
conclude that a cloud is comprised from grid,
virtualisation and utility computing notions. (Buyya,
2008) defines a cloud as a type of parallel and
distributed system consisting of a collection of inter-
connected and virtualised computers that are
dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more
unified computing resources based on service-level
agreements established through negotiation between the
service provider and consumers.
Grids have been developed for solving scientific problems
and thus security, reliability and use by non-academics were
initially far away from being the primary concerns. On a
similar vein, we could also point out that grids are the first
generation of this type of paradigm and thus, it would be
completely unfair to expect a fully functional paradigm
which would fully meet real-world business requirements.
The fact that clouds are based on grids demonstrates
grids’ sustainable robustness, as well as business value and
prospects. Thus, taking a broader view we can define a
cloud as a refactored business-oriented grid model.
Users forming the cloud can access resources, solve
problems such as in grids, but in a well-defined robust
commercialised context; offering a more structured, scalable
and personalised management control; as well as by being
charged with a cost (Bessis, 2010). In brief, one can
conclude that the goal of grids and clouds is to purposefully
utilise resources (data, computational power, software,
toolkits, expertise, etc.) that is available from/to
VO partners so they can more effectively solve mainly
scientific (grid) or commercial (cloud) problems. However,
neither of these technologies should be seen as a
panacea and thus, other complementary technologies should
be used.
• Web 2.0: There have been various attempts to define
Web 2.0. Mostly they contrast what web functionality
is offered to its users and how it differs with Web 2.0.
This distinction is a key to understand where the
boundaries are as between ‘the web’, as a set of
technologies, and ‘Web 2.0’, as an attempt to
conceptualise the significance of a set of outcomes that
are enabled by those Web 2.0 technologies (Anderson,
2007). In a similar vein, (O’Reilly, 2006) defines Web
2.0 as a set of economic, social, and technology trends
that collectively form the basis for the next generation
of the internet. A more mature, distinctive medium
characterised by user participation, openness, and
network effects. It is particularly important to realise
that Web 2.0 (also seen as an activity regulator) offers a
platform where users as individuals or communities are
able to communicate online their ideas and feelings on
shared topics of interests using available collaborative
services (or social software). Web 2.0 and social
networking services include but are not limited to
wikis, blogs, photosharing, bookmarking and
professional networking. In fact, there is little
difference in concept with Grid based-VOs. Mainly, it
is the functionality offered by the technology, which
forms the capabilities, as well as the users’ expectations
of it.
• Pervasive computing: Moving now to pervasive (also
known as ubiquitous) computing, one may realise that
these technology paradigms have been developed as a
means to enable resource computation and utilisation in
a far more mobile or environmentally-embedded
manner. Pervasive computing embeds computing and
information technologies into our environments by
integrating them seamlessly into our everyday lives
(Weiser, 2001). Pervasive computing has many
potential real-world applications ranging from health to
environmental monitoring systems. It is quite common
to involve a number of devices including mobile
phones, PDAs, sensors and computers. Lately, situated
computing as an emerging paradigm deals with
computing devices having the autonomous ability of
adapting, detecting, interpreting and responding to the
user’s environment. Readers are pointed to
(Gero, 2006) who gives a solid background of the
fundamentals for situated computing. Situated
computing makes use of concepts from situated
cognition (Clancey, 1997). Thus, where and when
someone is, it matters, and that the state s/he is in
affects what s/he does. The fundamental difference is
between encoding all knowledge prior to its use and
allowing the knowledge to be developed and grounded
in the interaction between the tool and its environment.
The effect of this is to provide a computational system
such as a tool with experience based on its interaction
with its environment. That experience is then used to
guide future actions. The effect of this grounded
experience is to provide the tool with the capability to
respond differently when exposed to the same
environment again depending on the experiences it has
had between these two exposures. The objective
knowledge within the tool remains unchanged, only the
knowledge that is the result of the interaction of the tool
with its environment is changed. This provides the basis
for computational systems to learn and change their
behaviour based on their experiences. The learning is
not necessary to improve the performance of the system
rather it is designed to customise it to its user (Gero,
2006).
• Crowd sourcing/crowd computing: More recently a
new technology driven paradigm called crowd sourcing
(also known as crowd computing or citizen science) has
been introduced. Some studies have proven the
potential worth of so-called ‘crowd-sourced’ mobile
phone data (Paulos, 2009; Bessis, 2010). Some of these
pilot studies have shown that mobile phones and mobile
sensors can be used by ordinary ‘citizens’ to gather data
that could be useful in various settings. (Paulos, 2009)
has also coined the term ‘citizen science’ for solutions
 A next generation emerging technologies roadmap for enabling collective computational intelligence 83

that seek to leverage collective citizen-based collection.
However, participatory data collection activities of this
kind and their subsequent aggregation and analysis by
decision makers pose significant opportunities and
challenges.
• Collective intelligence/complex event processing: It is
important to briefly define collective intelligence for
the purpose of this exploratory paper. The concept of
collective intelligence creates a free-flowing system of
knowledge with no bureaucratic controller; it also
creates an informational free-for-all where no-one
decides what knowledge is worthy of contribution and
what should be left out (Lévy, 1999). In Gualtieri and
Rymer (2009), it is described that complex event
processing is best for applications that require
near-real-time responses to dynamic, multifaceted,
rapidly changing situations. It can also be used to
manage and interpret events in a wide variety of context
processes. It is mainly used for co-ordinating, detecting,
informing and acting on in response to various events
that occur in various heterogeneous and distributed
systems. It is mainly used as event monitoring,
intelligent information filtering and event pattern
recognition.
The vision of this exploratory paper is to pose both the
challenge and the opportunity in bringing these next
generation emerging technologies together to compute
intelligently (identify data relationships, trends, etc.) in a
collective manner (not as now) by capturing, integrating,
analysing, mining, annotated and visualised distributed
data – made available from various VO and community
users – in a meaningful and collaborative for the
organisation manner, that matters the organisational needs.
This will in turn extend the technologies bounded topology
to a wider and dynamically coordinated community.
Figure 3 illustrates the flow of the aforementioned
collective computational intelligence processes with and
between collaborative VO members and community users

Table 1 Mapping of indicative requirements to indicative technologies

Indicative questions Indicative answers Indicative technologies Indicative methods Indicative challenges
Where data is residing Data come from various P2P, push and Native or gateway Social networking,
(capture)? sources and platforms. notifications, pervasive, engines including but not content and context
Environment is Web 2.0, situated, crowd limited to Oracle, aware data merging and
distributed and sourcing, wireless mySQL, Access, XML integration methods.
heterogeneous. Data communications and documents, FTP, HTTP,
sources can also fed from mobile devices, ad-hoc emails, etc.
various instruments such networks.
as sensors.
Is data integration Yes. Remote access from P2P, push and Web services, APIs, Social networking,
required (transmission, hierarchical, relational, notifications, pervasive, OGSAI-DAIS, RFID, etc. autonomic, semantics,
retrieval)? object and flat files. Web 2.0, situated Support for various trust, reliability,
Integration algorithms computing, crowd drivers such as CGI, reputation, security,
including extract from sourcing, wireless ODBC, JDBC, etc. in-compatibility, data
source, match, map and communications and Transfer from/to e-mail, anomalies, policies, etc.
move to the target. On mobile devices, ad-hoc URL, FTP, etc.
demand and on the fly networks.
integration is required.
Are there any analyses Yes. Decision support Complex event Markov, Bayesian, Data and text mining,
and/or simulation systems, intelligent processing, models, multi-variation, collective computational
modelling involved agents and artificial cases, scheduling, optimisation, intelligence.
(manipulation)? intelligence. monitoring, etc. interpolation, etc.
Are these Yes. Remote access is Clusters, grid and cloud Virtualisation, and Outsourcing,
computationally required. computing. replication, batch sustainability,
intensive (store)? processing, firewalls, etc. scalability, load
balancing, queuing, etc.
Do results are outputed Yes. Data could be Pervasive and situated Ajax, XML, mobile Context awareness,
and/or communicated in displayed in various computing, P2P, Web agents, location based standards, collaborative
different ways (display)? devices including PCs, 2.0, telepresence, etc. services, transcoding, technologies,
GIS, mobiles, mashups, content adaptation, etc. personalisation, RSS,
maps, etc. etc.
What is the end-user’s Varies from novice to Agents, context aware Learning theory, Swarm Ambient intelligence,
IT-related skill-set? highly experienced. technologies agents, etc. intelligence, q-learning, adaptive interfaces, HCI,
Non-human users are also remote profile discovery. virtual worlds, tagging,
included. etc.
84 N. Bessis et al.
Figure 3 Mapping the collective computational intelligence
processes
The relationship cycle between these discussed emerging
technologies paradigm is shown in Figure 4. The view here
is that a technology roadmap should combine emergency
management stakeholders’ requirements with next
generation emerging technologies that enable the processes
of capturing, transmitting, storing, retrieving, manipulating
and displaying relevant data.
Figure 4 Mapping the cycle of data processes with next
generation emerging technologies
Source: adapted from Bessis et al. (2010)
In turn, these should further improve the emergency
management’s stakeholders’ collective computational
intelligence by further supporting the effective and efficient
operation, management, and informed decision-making
when it is required.
Figure 5 A draft technology roadmap to enable collective
computational intelligence in disaster management
Following the aforementioned technological developments
and most recent works in the area, Figure 5 shows our
proposed draft technology roadmap in an illustrative
manner.
4.3 Phase 3: follow-up activity
The work in (Asimakopoulou, 2008) showed that a small
group of emergency management stakeholders and a small
group of technologies’ experts agreed that grid technologies
seem to improve their decision-making.
Clearly, this approach must be re-visited and exposed to
a much larger group of stakeholders and technologies’
experts for update, review and validation purposes. Our
current visionary work stands as a pilot yet incomplete
activity and therefore, further engagement with various
level stakeholders is required to assess whether the draft
technology roadmap produced in Phase 2 is a suitable
means to foster discussion for a network of excellence in the
area. That is to say, to initiate and systematically engage the
community towards the utilisation of next generation
emerging technologies for improving the collective
computational intelligence of disaster management
stakeholders.
5 Conclusions and future work
In this exploratory paper, we have discussed a visionary
opportunity among various emerging paradigms including
grid, cloud, crowd, pervasive and situated computing, to be
integrated for a collective intelligence model for disaster
management and other environments such as knowledge
cities where a smart approach would be a significant
advantage. To achieve this, we have offered a brief
review of next generation emerging technologies and
demonstrated the relationship between these and how they
could potentially impact decision-making in disaster
management scenarios including scenarios of occupational
hazards.
We also produced and described an early (preliminary)
technology-driven roadmap that clearly demonstrates the
technical challenges and opportunities in making a realistic
and feasible research agenda. Our position is to foster a
collaborative discussion in an area, which requires urgent
attention. Our future plans are to extend this roadmap to
include clear steps and be visionary for various critical
infrastructures. For example, there is a core need to develop
complex event processing engines and a detailed
specification model for the coordination between these
technologies in order to achieve useful and reliable
collective computational intelligence.
 A next generation emerging technologies roadmap for enabling collective computational intelligence
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