A Real Time Semantic Interoperability Framework for Ad Hoc Network of Geospatial Databases: Disaster Management Context

Disasters are events that cross geographical, organisational and other human-made or natural boundaries. Therefore, disaster management requires that various geospatial data producers and users collaborate together in an ad hoc manner, despites their different background and contexts. While semantic interoperability is meant to support meaningful communication between geospatial databases, semantic interoperability approaches that were designed for static and closed environments, or that do not address the particularities of geospatial data, are not suitable for supporting disaster management. In this paper, we describe a new approach for supporting real time semantic interoperability in ad hoc network of geospatial databases that can answer the needs of disaster management. The major components of our framework include (1) the discovering and formation of meaningful coalitions of geospatial databases which integrates quality of data sources’ descriptions (metadata) to improve discovering results; (2) a tool for semantic extraction based on a new concept representation, called the Multi-View Augmented Concept; (3) the semantic reconciliation of heterogeneous geospatial databases through semantic mapping process in static network ; (4) multi-strategies query propagation method to account for changes in the ad hoc network. Finally, we demonstrate how this framework can contribute to support disaster management. ∗ Corresponding author: [email protected]