Semantic Web in Disaster Management: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Disaster management requires extensive and various information. Semantic web offers a large potential to be utilized in the applications for supporting disaster management with its ability to integrate heterogeneous data from diverse sources. This study aims at investigating the extent to which semantic web is used in disaster management systems. The study conducted as a systematic literature review on 13 papers from academic databases that are leading in the area of computer science, i.e. ACM Digital Library, IEEE Explore and Science Direct. The result shows that the applications in the selected papers are mainly provided to institutions responsible for disaster management. Emergency relief is the phase that is supported by most applications. The study indicates that common geospatial ontology is necessary to facilitate the development of semantic web applications for disaster management. In the selected papers, the use of semantic web for data integration is done via an integration layer. This layer includes semantic processing to ensure that all data from multiple sources have proper semantics and to facilitate the application in querying the integrated information.