Shared situational awareness and information quality in disaster management

The importance of timely and accurate information for the relevant actors in disaster response is essential. Disaster response efforts are based on relevant facts concerning the situation at hand. The relevant information alone is not sufficient if the quality of that information does not meet the needs. Quality literature focuses mainly on the producer point of view of quality or the information systems perspective of quality. There is a need for a broader approach that combines the information needs in certain contexts with different aspects of information quality. The research presented in this paper suggests a method for defining the critical information and the relevant information quality elements that is required to build the SSA in disaster response. The method can be used for improving the performance and shared situational awareness required for the response operation by finding the essential information quality needs and gaps.