Today’s First Responders (FR) are using technology of the past. During their primary mission of saving lives and preserving society’s safety and security, FRs face a multitude of challenges. In both small scale emergencies and large scale disasters, they often deal with life-threatening situations, hazardous environments, uncharted surroundings and limited awareness. Threats and hazards evolve rapidly, crossing municipalities, regions and nations with speed and ease. Armouring public safety services with all the tools that modern technology has to offer is critical. Such tools holistically enhance their protection and augment their operational capacities, assisting them in saving lives as well as ensuring their safe return from the disaster scene.

In order to meet those goals, INGENIOUS will develop, integrate, test, deploy and validate a Next Generation Integrated Toolkit (NGIT) for Collaborative Response, which ensures high level of Protection & Augmented Operational Capacity to respond to the disaster scene. This will comprise a multitude of the tools and services required: 1) for enabling protection of the FRs with respect to their health, safety and security; 2) for enhancing their operational capacities by offering them with means to conduct various response tasks and missions boosted with autonomy, automation, precise positioning, optimal utilisation of available resources and upgraded awareness and sense-making; 3) for allowing shared response across FR teams and disciplines by augmenting their field of view, information sharing and communications between teams and with victims.

In Ingenious, MKLab as a department of the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) of CERTH will have significant contribution to WP4 “Information Management, Augmenting the Common Operational Picture & FR Apps”, developing and integrating the ontology-based framework for representing information about resources, entities and relations pertinent to the application domain of INGENIOUS. CERTH will also contribute to the framework for collecting and analyse data from social media and online content to assist first responders with additional contextual information.