Framing the design space for novel crisis-related mashups: The eStoryS example

Web 2.0 can be viewed as a platform where users can develop their own web applications. It is also characterized by a vast amount of user-generated contents presenting spatial and temporal components, by means of associated metadata. These metadata has been successfully exploited to generate map-based mashups (web applications gathering data from different sources) facing different kind of crisis situations, ranging from natural disasters (earthquakes, wildfires, floods...) to human-made disasters (terrorist attacks, school shootings, conflicts...). The social and collaborative dimensions of the Web 2.0 can be also exploited for managing crisis-related information. We present here a survey of current crisis-related mashups we employed to extract design dimensions and provide a conceptual framework that can be used: A) to understand current systems and; b) to design next generation of crisis-related mashups. We propose the eStoryS system as an example of application developed following the design principles presented in this paper. On the basis of our analysis, we believe that the design dimensions posited here provide useful insights for the design of novel web mashups in the emergency management domain.