DISASTER

DISASTER

Data interoperability solution at stakeholders' emergencies reaction.

Grant Agreement No.: N/A

Budget: US$ 3.871.249

Emergency management and information exchange

Emergency management and information exchange become more challenging in an international crisis because of cultural, linguistic and legal differences between all stakeholders, especially first responders. Misunderstandings between first responders slow down decision-making and make it more difficult. The recent spread and development of networks and Emergency Management Systems (EMS) has facilitated communication and improved emergency responses, allowing them to become more coordinated and successful in overcoming distances issues, and allowing decentralized decision-making when necessary and appropriate. However, EMS have not still solved problems related to cultural, legal and linguistic differences. In addition, from a technical perspective, the consolidation of current EMS and the limitations of their exchanged data formats offers significant problems for any solution proposing information interoperability and understanding between heterogeneous Emergency Management Systems located in different countries, and operating within different contexts.

Overcoming a complicated situation

To overcome this complicated situation, a two-step solution is proposed: (i) As the main objective and foundation of this proposal, the development of a common and modular ontology shared by all the stakeholders is proposed to offer the best solution to gather all stakeholders’ knowledge in a unique and flexible data model, taking into account different countries cultural, linguistic and legal issues (ii) Then, taking advantage of the fact that most legacy Emergency Management Systems are based on Service-Oriented-Architectures (SOA), i.e. those systems compile information from distributed and specialized systems (e.g. Geographic Information Systems), the interoperability information burden will be addressed by means of transparent SOA mediation algorithms compliant with current data formats and existing solutions.

We are creating a new scenario with a forest fire that is taking place in Southern Europe which has experienced a prolonged heat period and drought without rainfall. Several forest fires have been breaking out throughout the region’s forested areas over the past three weeks.

National civil protection aerial means and ground forces in the three countries are employed in the ongoing fire-fighting activities. The situation then worsened due to unfavorable winds, extremely low humidity and temperatures of over 25 degrees Celsius even during night-time and by morning large areas are affected by fires.