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Abstract. Emergency management becomes more challenging in international crisis episodes because of cultural, semantic and linguistic differences between all stakeholders, especially first responders. Misunderstandings between first responders makes decision making slower and more difficult. However, spread and development of networks and IT-based emergency management systems (EMSs) have improved emergency responses, which have become more coordinated. Despite improvements made in recent years, EMSs have not still solved problems related to cultural, semantic and linguistic differences which are the real cause of slower decision making. In addition, from a technical perspective, the consolidation of current EMSs and the different formats used to exchange information offers another problem to be solved in any solution proposed for information interoperability between heterogeneous EMSs in different contexts.To overcome these problems, we present a software solution based on semantic and mediation technologies. EMERGency ELements (EMERGEL) (Fundacion CTIC and AntwortING Ingenieurbüro PartG, 2013), a common and modular ontology shared by all the stakeholders, has been defined. It offers the best solution to gather all stakeholders' knowledge in a unique and flexible data model, taking into account different countries' cultural and linguistic issues. To deal with the diversity of data protocols and formats, we have designed a service-oriented architecture for data interoperability (named DISASTER: Data Interoperability Solution At STakeholders Emergency Reaction) providing a flexible extensible solution to solve the mediation issues. Web services have been adopted as specific technology to implement this paradigm that has the most significant academic and industrial visibility and attraction. Contributions of this work have been validated through the design and development of a cross-border realistic prototype scenario, actively involving both emergency managers and emergency-first responders: the Netherlands-Germany border fire.

Abstract. Emergency management becomes more challenging in international crisis episodes because of cultural, semantic and linguistic differences between all stakeholders, especially first responders. Misunderstandings between first responders makes decision-making slower and more difficult. However, spread and development of networks and IT-based Emergency Management Systems (EMS) has improved emergency responses, becoming more coordinated. Despite improvements made in recent years, EMS have not still solved problems related to cultural, semantic and linguistic differences which are the real cause of slower decision-making. In addition, from a technical perspective, the consolidation of current EMS and the different formats used to exchange information offers another problem to be solved in any solution proposed for information interoperability between heterogeneous EMS surrounded by different contexts. To overcome these problems we present a software solution based on semantic and mediation technologies. EMERGency ELements (EMERGEL) (Fundacion CTIC and AntwortING Ingenieurbüro PartG 2013), a common and modular ontology shared by all the stakeholders, has been defined. It offers the best solution to gather all stakeholders' knowledge in a unique and flexible data model, taking into account different countries cultural linguistic issues. To deal with the diversity of data protocols and formats, we have designed a Service Oriented Architecture for Data Interoperability (named DISASTER) providing a flexible extensible solution to solve the mediation issues. Web Services have been adopted as specific technology to implement such paradigm that has the most significant academic and industrial visibility and attraction. Contributions of this work have been validated through the design and development of a cross-border realistic prototype scenario, actively involving both emergency managers and emergency first responders: the Netherlands–Germany border fire.

-This paper presents a light inference system for context management, ready to perform reasoning tasks in resource-constrained devices. The inference system is part of a service-oriented mobile software framework which runs on Javaenabled handheld devices. This framework serves to facilítate the creation of context-aware applications, as it decouples sensor's data acquisition and context processing from the application logic itself. The inference architecture is composed by different modules; some of them encapsulate existing tools (ujena and Bossam) that have been adapted to the mobile working environment. The (rule-based) reasoning is prepared to use a general ontology. Both applications and the framework's components may configure the query set in order to retrieve the information they need from the inference system. In the paper, a validation example shows how this process is done.

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Abstract. Intelligent environments offer information filled spaces. When trying to navigate among all the offered resources users can be overwhelmed. This problem is increased by the heterogeneous nature of resources in smart environments. Users must choose between a plethora of services, multimedia information, interaction modalities and devices. But at the same time the unique characteristics of smart spaces offers us more opportunities to filter these resources. To help users find the resource that they want and need we have designed a multi-aspect recommendation system that takes into account not only the features of the resource and the user, but also context data like the location and current activity. The developed system is flexible enough to be applied to different resource types and scenarios. In this paper we will describe the identified aspects and how they are merged into a single metric.

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