DISASTER: Data interoperability solution for emergency response

Emergency management in international crisis situations is complicated by the cultural, linguistic, and legal differences among the players involved, especially first responders. Although emergency management systems (EMS) have improved communication, they did not resolve the problems arising from those differences or from the incompatibility of data formats between systems in different countries.

The objectives of the project were:

• To develop a common, modular ontology, shared by all players involved in an emergency, capable of capturing their knowledge in a single, flexible data model.
• To facilitate the exchange of information between emergency services in different countries through semantic technologies.
• To validate the solution in real-world scenarios through field exercises with responders from different countries.

DISASTER was built around the following pillars:

• EMERGEL ontology: a modular vocabulary that acts as a common interpreter between heterogeneous emergency management systems, with more than 350 datasets incorporated and coverage of eighteen countries.
• Mediation components: an architecture of mediators that translate protocols, formats, and data models between existing EMS without the need to replace the infrastructure already deployed.
• Field validation: two real exercises, one involving a cross-border fire between the Netherlands and Germany and the other an aircraft collision at Schiphol airport, with the participation of responders from different agencies.

CTIC took part in the consortium, contributing its experience in RDF modeling and format transformation to the development of the mediation components, including an adapter that made it possible to convert spreadsheet-format information into the EMERGEL semantic model.