Data Sources Handling for Emergency Management: Supporting Information Availability and Accessibility for Emergency Responders

Information is an essential component for better emergency response. Although a lot of information being available at various places during any kind of emergency, many emergency responders (ERs) use only a limited amount of the available information. The reason for this is that the available information heterogeneously distributed, in different formats, and ERs are unable to get access to the relevant information. Moreover, without having access to the needed information, many emergency responders are not able to obtain a sufficient understanding of the emergency situation. Consequently, a lot of time is being used to search for the needed information and poor decisions may be made. Therefore, in this paper, our research focuses on bringing the available heterogeneously dispersed information together to improve the information accessibility for ERs. In this study, we present an approach for integration of heterogeneous databases in the Semantic Web context using a Model-driven data integration approach based on an information model. We propose an architecture using the Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) and web service technologies for facilitating knowledge sharing and data exchange between different ERs. Based on the proposed architecture, we developed a system prototype and presented it with an indoor fire emergency response scenario.