Data interoperability software solution for emergency reaction in the Europe Union

Abstract

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.

An Ontological Model for Fire Evacuation Route Recommendation in Buildings

“…Our evaluation process used the Web tool, Ontology Improvement Tool (V2) 3 , which provides tools and services for ontology validation and improvement, such as syntactic validation check, with the RDF Triple-Checker 4 , ontology consistency, with the OOps! (OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner) 5 [22] or to verify if the semantic Web follows best practices 6,7,8 , a service provided by Vapour 9 . The tests carried were completed and are available on the ontology URL 10 .…”

“…The "Emergency Response Ontology" [6] addresses intelligent emergency response applications, focusing on interpreting and filtering relevant information from a large range of heterogeneous data. The EMERGEL (Emergency ELements) ontology, developed by [7] in the scope of the DISASTER project (Data Interoperability Solution in Emergency Reaction Stakeholders), contains knowledge and concepts related to emergencies. The EmergencyFire ontology [8] aims to share knowledge of the fire emergency response in buildings, contributing to the organisations' tactical and strategic plans.…”

A Semantics-Based Common Operational Command System for Multiagency Disaster Response

“…Emergencies Reaction) that seeks to solve the task of information sharing and coordination among international workforces (Casado, 2015). The authors proposed a software application that mediates communication among different CIMS.…”

An Ontological Approach to Enhancing Information Sharing in Disaster Response

“…The EMERGEL ontology, proposed in the context of the DISASTER project [19], focuses mainly on the mapping of different pre-defined information artifacts, taking account of how information represented in the different languages used in Europe. It reuses the class event from the DOLCE top-level ontology and draws also on other vocabularies such as FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) [20] that are used to model people in an emergency situation.…”