A Service-oriented Framework Supporting Ubiquitous Disaster Response Michele Amoretti, Maria Chiara Laghi, and Gianni Conte Information Engineering Department, University of Parma, 43100 Parma, Italy, michele.amoretti@unipr.it,laghi@ce.unipr.it,gianni.conte@unipr.it, WWW home page: http://dsg.ce.unipr.it Abstract. The synergy of ubiquitous computing and service-oriented technologies may lead to efficient, pervasive and dependable solutions in the challenging context of emergency management. Recently, novel paradigms have been proposed, most of them envisioning arbitrary pairs of peer application entities communicating and providing services di- rectly with each other and to users. In order to enforce these paradigms even to systems which include devices with limited processing and stor- age resources, lightweight middleware components are required. We il- lustrate how this is provided by JXTA-SOAP, a portable software com- ponent supporting peer-to-peer sharing of Web Services, and we show how it can be used to implement disaster response software applications. Key words: mobility, disaster response, middleware, services, peer-to- peer 1 Introduction Emergency management (or disaster management) is the discipline of dealing with and avoiding risks [13]. It involves preparing for disaster before it happens, disaster response (e.g. emergency evacuation, quarantine, mass decontamination, etc.), as well as supporting and rebuilding society after natural or human-made disasters have occurred. The disaster management cycle involves four key phases: 1. Mitigation: includes any activities that prevent a disaster, reduce the chance of a disaster happening, or reduce the damaging effects of unavoidable dis- asters. 2. Preparedness: includes plans or preparations made to save lives or property, and to help the response and rescue service operations. 3. Response: includes actions taken to save lives and prevent property dam- age, and to preserve the environment during emergencies or disasters. The response phase is the implementation of action plans. 4. Recovery: includes actions that assist a community to return to a sense of normalcy after a disaster. These four phases usually overlap. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is being used in all the phases, but the usage is more apparent in some