When disaster strikes, human lives may depend upon emergency organizations’ rapid establishment of Situation Awareness (SAW) to take the appropriate decisions and actions. Recently, systems emerged, enabling humans to act as crowd sensors contributing valuable crisis information via mobile devices through social media channels. This should allow enhancing situational pictures gained through traditional SAW systems, as employed in control center domains.

A common understanding about the necessary functionality of such crowd-sensed SAW systems for crisis management, however, is not yet reached nor is a detailed comparison thereof available up to now. This paper makes a first attempt towards this by a reference architecture incorporating crowd-sensed crisis information into SAW systems. Based on that, a systematic catalog of evaluation criteria is derived and used for an in-depth comparison of nine existing systems, thereby highlighting current capabilities and directions for further research.

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