Let's imagine a team member instructed to enter a building demolished by an earthquake and handling a PDA tied to his arm with a cord. His PDA not only tells him the safest path to follow on the basis of run-time information, but also gives him the message that he has to save a wounded person inside the ruin. The PDA also allows him, by touching another tab and activating/deactivating layers, to retrieve a map of the area giving the positions of his colleagues, damaged parts of the building and so on (see Figure). In addition to retrieving information from the PDA, he can also add an annotation that he has seen another injured person in the building.

This Point of Interest (POI) information is disseminated to his colleagues and the one who both available and closest to the casualty is tasked to help. Such a system is based on the following components:
- geo-awareness, by providing static information retrieved from back-end GISs and run-time information on positions of team members
- structured annotation describing actual situations as observed by team members
- task assignment and co-ordination carried out automatically by a mobile process management system.

The system provides great support to the emergency team, allowing them to entirely focus on help, rather than deal with co-ordination and geo-awareness, currently manually managed by dedicated team members.

The research required for development of this novel system for closer collaboration among team members began in 2006. The system was successfully showcased in a simulated exercise in June 2009 (see reference below). Now the Workpad project is finalised we hope the system will be developed on a large scale in the course of a follow-on project.