Collaborative heterogeneous integration of disaster and rescue information (CHIDRI)

Traditionally, the support in the event of a disaster were based on hardware, the expertise are strongly required to rescuers. For this reason, in the case that the disaster had been occurred, the role of the people expressly divided to the victims, the rescuers, and the onlookers. On the other hand, in the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake, many engineers tried to develop information support systems for the victims by information technologies. This fact shows that some of engineers become not onlookers but information providers. It can be estimated that one of the reasons why these systems were realized is generally utilization of information infrastructures such as web in our daily life. After such situation is considered, we started a project "Collaborative Heterogeneous Integration of Disaster and Rescue Information (CHIDRI)" which adopted to Challenge for Realizing Early Profits (CREP) in Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, we explain the frame, the purpose, and the activities of the challenge.