Julio R. RIBÓN¹, Luis Javier GARCÍA VILLALBA², Tai-hoon KIM^3
1 Programa de Ingeniería de Sistemas, Facultad de Ingenierías,
Universidad de Cartagena,
Sede Piedra de Bolívar, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia,
E-mail: jrodriguezr@unicartagena.edu.co
² Grupo de Análisis, Seguridad y Sistemas (GASS),
Departamento de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial (DISIA),
Facultad de Informática, Despacho 431,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM),
Calle Profesor José García Santesmases s/n,
Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid, Spain,
javiergv@fdi.ucm.es
³ Department of Convergence Security, Sungshin Women’s University,
249-1, Dongseon-dong 3-ga, Seoul, 136-742, Korea,
taihoonn@empas.com (Corresponding Author)

Abstract: There is a range of organizations which have expertise related to conflict areas (NGOs, governments, etc.). Many of these organizations have put their expertise in digital media that can be accessed by its members through technology platforms. The information in conflict areas is useful for decision making, to generate public policies for the control and humanitarian support. Organizations are willing to cooperate and share their expertise with others, but there is a technological problem that is making the above impossible and therefore causing isolation. This is caused by the inability of the technology platforms that each organization has, to locate and interoperate with expertise from other platforms. This paper describes an experience in which mobile technologies are used as sensing devices to identify positioning and movement of people who are in conflict areas and to capture multimedia information in such territory. These sensing devices allow access to a portfolio of services from a cooperating cloud of territorial information in the region of Montes de Maria (Colombia), which is a territory with political and public order conflicts. With this experience, a solution to the problem of technological isolation is offered and access to the expertise shared by peers in the community.

Keywords: Communities, Clouds, Mobile, Territories in Conflicts.

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CITE THIS PAPER AS:
Julio R. RIBÓN, Luis Javier GARCÍA VILLALBA, Tai-hoon KIM, Application of Mobile Technology in Virtual Communities with Information of Conflict-Affected Areas, Studies in Informatics and Control, ISSN 1220-1766, vol. 22 (1), pp. 33-42, 2013. https://doi.org/10.24846/v22i1y201304

Introduction

In the territories that present social and public order conflicts, information management and timely access to it, is of vital importance as it contributes to the understanding of the nature of the conflicts that arise. This produces solutions to these, supporting the creation of public policies relevant to the needs of the area, the development of strategies to help the victims of conflicts, the government action plans and the international community, which promote the development of the region.

In conflict areas there is a diversity of communities that are concerned with giving attention to vulnerable population and the development of strategies to resolve the conflict regarding the region, these communities are non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the state through its various entities such as law enforcement (police, army), local authorities (municipalities, ministries, etc..) communities that care for the population (e.g. The Red Cross, hospitals), international organizations and entities who study the conflict such as the universities and researchers in the area, among others.

Each of these communities have been able to gather useful experience for the understanding of the conflict and that is important from their perspective to find solutions to it. These expertise are available to members of each particular community. Recently used for storing digital media and that can be used by each of its members when needed. However, its generally found that such expertise can’t be accessed by members of other communities. In many cases communities are unaware of the expertise that others have and can be useful when studying and trying to resolve conflicts in the territory.

Despite the importance of sharing the experience generated in each community, to build a larger organization consisting of multiple cooperating communities, there’s a problem of technological isolation which prevents the realization of these collaborative spaces, so that members of virtual communities studying conflict zones can locate, share and access the expertise of other peers. This problem is caused by the inability of technology platforms, which each community have, to federate their expertise with other communities, making it impossible to generate a cloud of communities (Chen et al, 2010).

Each technology platform stores the expertise of each community in proprietary formats, which may or may not have standardization initiatives such as SCORM (Advanced Distributed Learning).