Geographical Semantic Representation for Collaborative Emergency Services

Geographical semantic representation, which aims at enhancing geospatial data model and facilitating information sharing and exchange, has been a hot topic in the realm of geographic information science. The research summarized here is to advance a geographical semantic representation framework to support geo-collaboration, focusing on how to take full advantage of Ontology and Web Services technologies to overcome the flaws of current WebGIS in the distributed cooperative computing model and application model, and make it better to serve collaborative GIS applications, such as collaborative emergency services. We considered a simplified evacuation scenario of toxic gas dispersion, following the proposed solution, the orchestration of application services based on semantics was conducted and illuminated. * Corresponding author: [email protected], phone 86-21-65983449; 1. INSTRODUCTION Geographical semantic representation, which aims at enhancing geospatial data model and facilitating information sharing and exchange, has been a hot topic in the realm of geographic information science for the last decade [Tryfona and Sharma, 1996; Bishr, 1998; Smith and Mark, 1998; Fonseca, Egenhofer, Agouris, et al., 2002; Zheng, 2006]. With rapid development of internet and the prevalent electronic business pattern, B2B, collaborative GIS is emerging and gaining more and more attentions [Zheng, 2006]. Urban Emergency management is a typical collaborative GIS application. Many social departments would participate in immediately and behave as dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations (VOs) [Foster, Kesselman, Tuecke, 2002] to deal with emergency event collaboratively once disaster occurs. In such cooperative work environment, some spatial decisionsupport operations do need interactions between business partners, which are usually geographically distributed. The interactions can be defined as a strict work flow and shared by every participant, joining them together on solving more complicated problems. It is of great significance to access and integrate distributed geospatial data and services effectively from different information providers in accordance with workflow. Geographical information sharing and collaboration requires agreement on meaning or interpretation of data in the specific domain. Geographical semantics is about understanding of GIS contents, and capturing this understanding in formal theories [kuhn, 2005]. It is reasonable to suppose that embedding explicit semantics on general geospatial data representation will help to improve common understanding and facilitate incorporating geospatial information services (GIServices) with E-Business flow seamlessly. As an explicit formal specification of a shared conceptualization [Gruber, 1993], ontology is adept in semantic expression and plays a key role in semantic-based information sharing and integration. Indeed there is currently a significant amount of effort being expended in the development of geographic ontologies and semantics in GIS community [Bishr, 1998; Kuhn, 2001, 2003, 2005; Mennis, 2003; Soon and Kuhn, 2004; Tryfona and Pfoser, 2005; Zheng, Feng, Jiang, et al., 2006]. In parallel, the potential for GIS to be the collaborative application environment among distributed agencies has also been widely discussed [Cai, 2005; MacEachren, Cai, Sharma, et al., 2005; Hopfer and MacEachren, 2007]. Our concern is with geographical semantic formalization and sharing in distributed, collaborative application environment. Towards the goal of improving geo-information collaboration and interoperability in urban emergency management, this paper is intended to present an integrated solution to enable geographical semantic representation with ontologies and facilitate GIServices integration and collaboration through semantic sharing. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: the next section describes methodology of the research. Geographic Ontology, Web Services, and the application in our work are discussed. Section 3 presents a general geographical semantic representation framework based on service oriented architecture (SOA) to support distributed collaborative GIS application. Some implementation issues of semantic representation are discussed. In section 4, a simplified evacuation scenario of toxic gas dispersion is introduced and the orchestration of application services based on formal semantics is conducted and illuminated. Section 5 comes to a conclusion with an outline of future work.