Publication
SoKNOS - Using Semantic Technologies in Disaster Management Software
Grigori Babitski; Simon Bergweiler; Olaf Grebner; Daniel Oberle; Heiko Paulheim; Florian Probst
In: The Semantic Web: Research and Applications. Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC-2011), 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference, May 29 - June 2, Heraklion, Greece, Pages 183-197, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS 6644), Vol. LNCS, No. 6644, ISBN 978-3-642-21033-4, Springer, 2011.
Abstract
Disaster management software deals with supporting staff in
large catastrophic incidents such as earthquakes or floods, e.g., by providing
relevant information, facilitating task and resource planning, and
managing communication with all involved parties. In this paper, we introduce
the SoKNOS support system, which is a functional prototype for
such software using semantic technologies for various purposes. Ontologies
are used for creating a mutual understanding between developers
and end users from different organizations. Information sources and services
are annotated with ontologies for improving the provision of the
right information at the right time, for connecting existing systems and
databases to the SoKNOS system, and for providing an ontology-based
visualization. Furthermore, the users' actions are constantly supervised,
and errors are avoided by employing ontology-based consistency checking.
We show how the pervasive and holistic use of semantic technologies
leads to a significant improvement of both the development and the usability
of disaster management software, and present some key lessons
learned from employing semantic technologies in a large-scale software
project.