Disaster mitigation and preparedness using linked open data

Abstract

In disaster management, disaster mitigation and preparedness phases play vital roles to diminish the damages caused by a particular disaster. The development of information systems which simulate disaster preparedness and mitigation activities requires integration of large amount of data from different diversified data sources. The goal of our work is to provide an effective way, by means of the Linked Open Data (LOD) technology, to bring such different, distributed data sources into a standardized and exchangeable common data format and hence to enable their interoperability and integration. We describe how to publish different sets of data sources in Resource Description Framework (RDF), the basic data structure of LOD, and how to interconnect them with other sources in the LOD cloud. The Sahana disaster management system has been enhanced with these interconnected RDF data leading to a system called Sahana Asia. Sahana Asia can simulate disaster mitigation and preparedness activities, benefiting vulnerable people, emergency management teams as well as other organizations involved in disaster management. It has been evaluated by participants with some backgrounds in disaster management and found to be effective in terms of system quality, information quality and overall system performance. A few future extensions of the system have also been presented. These extensions can be readily implemented as they all uniformly represent their data and information in RDF.