Re: Proposal for a domain

Hi Gav
I am also head down with deadlines, so will only briefly
reply to some main points

1. please do add the useful links or resources that you point to on the wiki
-also  I remember you volunteering to start maintaining a glossary  that we
may as well want to use as a starting point for further discussion.   In
terms of architecture, a controlled vocabulary is also going to be an
essential artifact, I ll be happy to maintain that in the future

2.  I am researching 'event classification' principles and have elicited
some comments from experts that I am posting on the wiki soon

3.  > disaster prevention and mitigation is the primary function of the
    > systems we should aim to build, right

Wrong. You can only mitigate and risk manage so much of nature.

Let me rephrase: maximize prevention and mitigate the effects of
nature..etc  -   bla bla (I was making up some points for discussion
following some conversations)
.
4.  as someone that owns and runs a private risk
and emergency management consultancy I take personal offence at your
comment.

Gavin, you have no reason to take offense. Corruption and systemic
malfunctions  simply need to be acknowledged (they exist)
They are not caused by individual entities, but by bad 'system design'.  Now
that we are undertaking to lay the foundations for future global, pervasive
and open systems, have the duty to acknowledge
the built in flaws in the existing systems and try to take corrective action
I look forward to your help with that aspect of the task


Cheers

Paola Di Maio


On 6/11/07, Gavin Treadgold <gt@kestrel.co.nz> wrote:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> Just starting to catch up with the recent activity on this list...
>
> On 9/06/2007, at 15:02, paola.dimaio@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > 1. In an earlier thread, I wonder whether 'disaster management' is
> > the best definition. Others whom I work with on this issue,
> > support the view that 'disaster' is not the best word that we
> > should use for a number of reasons.  examples: disaster is the last
> > stage of a crisis, also it is a very generic term, etc. We prefer
> > 'emergency mangemnet'. Therefore we propose that the name of this
> > list, and all realted issues are changed to 'emergengy management'
>
> +1 Disaster is a term commonly used to communicate the concept to
> communities etc because they can more easily relate to ther term.
> Emergency management doesn't clearly communicate the concepts to them
> - some people I have told that I work in emergency management assumed
> that I worked in a hospital! Emergency Management does seem to be one
> of the more commonly recognised terms for those that work in the
> field however - we all know what emergency management means.
>
> > 2. The risk with starting with one domain, is that we do not
> > sufficiently generalize the problem definition, therefore we will
> > end up with a knowledge representation that only applies to 'fly
> > pandemic' or either flu, or either pandemic, ie a narrow problem
> >
> > Another possibility, perhaps a bit more ambitious, is to start
> > defining a 'top level' domain for emergency management, and make
> > sure that the 'subdomain definitions'  all fit in there. This will
> > allow us to work the foundations of  a framework that can be
> > applied to any domain.
>
> +1 Some events have considerable overlap in their characteristics,
> whilst a pandemic scenario actually provides a somewhat unique event,
> in that it only directly impacts people, but not infrastructure,
> whereas most 'traditional' events impact both people and/or
> infrastructure. It would probably be better to start with a more
> 'traditional' event such as an earthquake or a flood, and then
> further refine it with a pandemic scenario. In reality, we are going
> to have to test whatever we develop against a broad range of events
> to ensure it is generalised enough to handle the wide range of
> events. A tricky question we will face is how wide do we go in terms
> of events? Drought, famine, war, climate change, resource shortages?
>
> On 9/06/2007, at 03:13, Xu, Wei wrote:
> > Or do you think it is better if we define different types of
> > disaster by means of the management processes? Do you think if it
> > is better if we abstract all the basic processes of managing a
> > disaster. For instance, the process of traffice control, which is
> > independent of any types of disaster --- it doesn't matter if the
> > disaster is caused by hurricane, by an exploration or whatever
>
> At first glance, this is probably the suitable approach to take. When
> it comes to response and recovery planning - this often occurs on a
> functional basis. If you Google for functional response plans, you
> should come up with many different structures that define Emergency
> Support Functions - such as Fire and Rescue, Law Enforcement,
> Information, Energy. Note that these functions do vary from country
> to country.
>
> > I think it is difficult to define a certain type of disaster,
> > because if we define the types of disaster, there are more things
> > we need to think about, for instance, the damage levels of
> > disasters, the people involved in the management work of disasters
> > and ect.
>
> If you want to open another can of worms, we could try and talk about
> disaster impact assessment. There are numerous models for capturing
> all the different sorts of damage that occur during an event. One
> example,
>
>   * Human (lives)
>   * Economic
>   * Societal (community services - not infrastructure, more social
> services)
>   * Infrastructure (power/water)
>   * Geographic/Natural
>
> A consistent taxonomy is required just to ensure that organisations
> are correctly structuring damage assessment information so that it
> can be shared and aggregated. I was involved in a little work on this
> last year in New Zealand. It doesn't seem to have progressed much since.
>
> <http://www.civildefence.govt.nz/memwebsite.nsf/wpg_URL/For-the-CDEM-
> Sector-Publications-Disaster-Impact-Assessment?OpenDocument>
>
> > It to me, how to model disaster management, remains unclear. But I
> > do agree with you, we need to start by a specific domain and a sample.
>
> Part of the problem is that that issue of emergency management is
> complex due to the number of actors involved and the structures and
> actors involved will depend on the event.
>
> On 10/06/2007, at 15:41, paola.dimaio@gmail.com wrote:
> > Thanks for the insights, my quick replies to main issues (apols for
> > top posting)
> > - proposed definitions are useful, and surely add wider dimensions
> > to the discourse
> > please do add your stuff to the wiki, for future reference, (just
> > try not to wipe everything else in the process). I think this would
> > be a good opportunity to start a glossary, or some kind of related
> > resource. Shall we keep the original links also? where did you
> > obtain those nice definitions from?
> >
> > - your three proposed 'subdomains' point to the beginning of
> > categorization, which is
> > the natural thing that happens when defining a new domain. you say
> > pandemic, hurricane, and conflict.  I read categories (disease,
> > weather, social) - note that I am not sure the names for these
> > categories are appropriate at this stage, lets think
>
> There is already a fairly good taxonomy of disaster in the EM-DAT
> research database.
>
> <http://www.em-dat.net/guidelin.htm>
>
> As a brief aside - crisis is certainly not a preferred term to be
> used by professionals in the field. It implies a lack of preparation
> and control. I would recommend against using the term crisis in
> defining the overall domain we are discussing.
>
> On 10/06/2007, at 16:05, paola.dimaio@gmail.com wrote:
> > - words have connotations, implications, repercussions, implicit
> > meaning that carry semantic weight - it is worth trying to get the
> > words right
>
> Not to mention legal definitions, which vary from country to country.
>
> > - emergencies properly manged do not escalate,
> >          crises are emergencies  gone out of hand,
> >                     disasters are crises that have gone out of hand,
>
> I'd love to see where you got that definition from! :)
>
> Also, those definitions may only work with the benefit of hours or
> days of hindsight. E.g you may not be able to assess that you have
> 'lost control' of events until hours or days after you actually lost
> control.
>
> You are correct in identifying that there is an escalating scale of
> impacts and consequences, but there is no progression from
> emergency<>crisis<>disaster. Often times these terms are used
> interchangeably by people that don't know better.
>
> It is also a matter of adaptive capacity (an element of resilience)
> that the levels used to define response capability vary between
> different individuals, organisations and countries.
>
> > disaster prevention and mitigation is the primary function of the
> > systems we should aim to build, right
>
> Wrong. You can only mitigate and risk manage so much of nature. The
> reason we have readiness, response and recovery is precisely because
> we are _not_ able to prevention or mitigate all of our risks. Our
> goal, therefore, is to support all aspects of comprehensive emergency
> management - what we in NZ call the four R's (reduction, readiness,
> response and recovery), what those in the US may called mitigation,
> planning, response and recovery. Side note - relief shares elements
> of response and recovery, in an international context it can take
> days for agencies to mobilise and so they are not their for the
> initial response, rather they arrive for the end of response and the
> transition to recovery where the emphasis is shifting from rescue to
> meeting survival needs (food, water, shelter) and attempting to rebuild.
>
> paola.dimaio@gmail.com wrote:
> > my personal opinion: disaster management is a money making machine
>
> Don Cameron wrote:
> > I do not believe this comment adds real value to the conversation.
>
> I agree with Don, and as someone that owns and runs a private risk
> and emergency management consultancy I take personal offence at your
> comment. But that discussion should not be continued here.
>
> On 11/06/2007, at 03:01, Rex Brooks wrote:
> > However, I usually describe the domain as encompassing the
> > preparation(s) for, response(s) to, mitigation of and recovery from
> > emergency incidents. I state it that way to include the lifecycle
> > of both the emergency and the overall response effort(s) which need
> > to include preparation(s).
>
> Comprehensive Emergency Management isn't so much a circular
> lifecycle, even though it seems to get represented as a circle quite
> often.
>
> Reduction/mitigation* and readiness/preparation occur in advance of
> an event. Response and recovery occur immediately before (when you
> have warning systems) and after an event. Most of these processes do
> occur in parallel. Reduction planning and actions (e.g. removing or
> minimising community risk) generally occur at the same time as
> preparedness planning and actions (developing response plans,
> training and exercising) because responsibilities for these functions
> are often in different places so they can occur in parallel.
>
> * Yes, there are elements of mitigation that occur during response
> and recovery, but in this context they are considered as risk
> management of response and recovery, and shouldn't be considered the
> same as mitigation/reduction that occurs in advance of an event.
>
> Likewise with response and recovery. A good recovery manager will
> start planning for recovery immediately after the event, as part of
> the response effort, even though the major recovery work won't start
> until response is starting to wind down.
>
> On 11/06/2007, at 16:56, Chamindra de Silva wrote:
> > paola.dimaio@gmail.com wrote:
> >> I think this would be a good opportunity to start a glossary, or
> >> some kind of related resource. Shall we keep the original links
> >> also? where did you obtain those nice definitions from?
> > I think a glossary will be a good start. Lets use the WIKI setup
> > for us at: http://esw.w3.org/topic/DisasterManagement ( however a
> > sub topic of this preferably)
>
> There is still this one that I started a while ago back when we were
> discussing these issues on HumanitarianICT. This is a temporary
> location, but happy to have it used as the basis for something else.
> There are still many documents and definitions to include. I started
> it with an NZ focus, but no reason we couldn't include more - there
> are some international documents I've included already.
>
> <http://www.plan.net.nz/wiki/index.php/Category:Terms>
>
> > I do believe we need both. A generalization that allows for sharing
> > of data across disaster events and a specialization (inherited from
> > the generalization) per disaster type. The prior provides more
> > value in allowing us to share data across multiple disasters,
> > whilst the latter provides more value specific to the disaster type.
>
> I'm not so sure if we need specialisations that are tied to specific
> disaster types. Disasters could be classified by the mixture of
> emergency support functions, and their associated information needs.
> Each event would present a different profile, for sure, but I think
> it could all be accomplished with ESF's rather than tying it to a
> specific event type.
>
> If you think about the difference between a tsunami and a pandemic,
> it is not the nature of the event itself, but rather the different
> combinations of response and recovery functions that are required.
> Hence a functional approach is probably more suited, and hence why
> many response plans are moving towards a functional, all-hazards
> approach rather than having scenario-driven plans for each disaster
> type.
>
> Whew!
>
> Cheers Gav
>
>
>
>
>


-- 



Paola Di Maio *****
School of Information Technology
Mae Fah Luang University
Chiang Rai - Thailand
*********************************************