The WeKnowIt project recently participated in a simulation of an emergency exercise, in cooperation with the Sheffield City Council and Sheffield Emergency Services. The simulation was of a chemical attack on a major building in the city centre. The emergency services were testing how effectively they could set up decontamination tents and process as many members of the public and sufficiently decontaminate them.

WeKnowIt participated in two capacities. First of all, a member of the team observed the entire incident, from the beginning to dealing with decontaminated people in the Sheffield United football ground. The purpose of this observation was to collect a large set of geo-located images for use in future experiments and to test how well the WeKnowIt ER demonstrator could display and process.

In addition to this five citizen participants were asked to arrive at the incident at a random time and to capture some images using a stripped down version of the WeKnowIt interface to examine how a typical user annotates emergency information in the field.