Hudumia: a platform to support spontaneous volunteers' situational awareness, coordination and safety underemergency scenarios

Spontaneous volunteers always emerge under emergency scenarios and are vital to a successful community response, yet some uncertainty subsists around their role and its inherent acceptance by official entities under emergency scenarios. In our research we have identified that most of the spontaneous volunteers do have none or little support from official entities, hence they end up facing critical problems as situational awareness, safety instructions and guidance, motivation and group organization. We argue that official entities still play a crucial role and should change some of their behaviors regarding spontaneous volunteerism. We aim with this thesis to design a software architecture and a framework in order to implement a solution to support spontaneous volunteerism under emergency scenarios along with a set of guidelines for the design of open information management systems. Together with the collaboration from both citizens and emergency professionals we have been able to attain several important contributions, as the clear identification of the roles taken by both spontaneous volunteers and professionals, the importance of volunteerism in overall community response and the role which open collaborative information management systems have in the community volunteering efforts. These conclusions have directly supported the design guidelines of our software solution proposal. In what concerns to methodology, we first review literature on technologies support to emergencies and how spontaneous volunteers actually challenge these systems. Following, we have performed a field research where we have observed that the emerging of spontaneous volunteer’s efforts imposes new requirements for the design of such systems, which leaded to the creation of a cluster of design guidelines that supported our software solution proposal to address the volunteers’ requirements. Finally we have architected and developed an online open information management tool which has been evaluated via usability engineering methods, usability user tests and heuristic evaluations.

SysPRE: systematized process for requirements engineering in knowledge discovery projects

The domain of Knowledge Discovery (KD) and Data Mining (DM) is of growing importance in a time where more and more data is produced and knowledge is one of the most precious assets. Having explored both the existing underlying theory, the results of the ongoing research in academia and the industry practices in the domain of KD and DM, we have found that this is a domain that still lacks some systematization. We also found that this systematization exists to a greater degree in the Software Engineering and Requirements Engineering domains, probably due to being more mature areas. We believe that it is possible to improve and facilitate the participation of enterprise stakeholders in the requirements engineering for KD projects by systematizing requirements engineering process for such projects. This will, in turn, result in more projects that end successfully, that is, with satisfied stakeholders, including in terms of time and budget constraints. With this in mind and based on all information found in the state-of-the art, we propose SysPRE - Systematized Process for Requirements Engineering in KD projects. We begin by proposing an encompassing generic description of the KD process, where the main focus is on the Requirements Engineering activities. This description is then used as a base for the application of the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) so that we can specify a formal ontology for this process. The resulting SysPRE ontology can serve as a base that can be used not only to make enterprises become aware of their own KD process and requirements engineering process in the KD projects, but also to improve such processes in reality, namely in terms of success rate.