Ubiquitous and participatory social networking for ambient situational awareness

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This proposal promotes viable communities through allowing City residents the opportunity to collaboratively develop a collective situational awareness through an assembly of individual perspectives. This proposal focuses on empowering residents of Canadian cities to take a vital part in enhancing the quality of service delivered out of municipal infrastructures especially during real life events such as emergencies. We take the quality of this infrastructure for granted until it fails in some way (e.g., traffic congestions and vehicle incidents are becoming Canadian 'household' concerns). This makes the management of the civil infrastructure key to our societal and economical metabolism. In the platform, city residents use their mobile devices to report infrastructure status information; this requires minimal deployment of sensors for the applications considered. Situational content is transported to city headquarters using municipal wireless mesh networks (WMN) to enhance their ROI. City servers take advantage of the social relationships between city residents as well as their real-time physical location to filter and aggregate user-generated situational content. The WMN is used to transfer back situational knowledge to city residents (on their portable devices) roaming across the city. In more time critical applications, such as incident management, situational information (e.g., incident notifications) may ripple across the WMN covering highways notifying travelling cars and diverting traffic to avoid vehicle build up. In addition, City residents may query databases and locate real-time emergency information in an accurate and timely no matter where they are (e.g., evacuation scheduling and destination choice to the nearest safe shelters). The platform exploits the convergence of social computing and networking disciplines and relies on constructs that integrate features of municipal infrastructure and social relationships among city residents. This proposal contributes to the wireless cities vision, adopted in more than 25 Canadian cities, by enabling new types of value-added applications that supports emergency evacuation planning, traffic congestion management and vehicle incident management applications.