In a typical technologically advanced region, data and information critically needed to support disaster preparedness and response decisions and operations are available but may reside not only in sources built by the government for disaster management purposes, but also in information sources owned by other government agencies, businesses, institutions, social media, etc. Making such data and information easily discoverable, available and useable by diverse time-critical disaster preparedness and response applications should be a primary objective of disaster management information systems. This paper presents a distributed framework, called virtual repository, that leverages linked open data and related technologies to achieve this objective. Applications may use a virtual repository (VR) built on the framework to supplement information sources served by it. In addition to the design and implementation of a proof-of-concept VR prototype, the paper also presents two applications, Automatic Disaster Alert System for Tourists (ADAST) and Mobile Assistant for Disasters (MAD), as case studies to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of YR.

Nowadays, developed regions in the world, including Taiwan, have a wealth of data and information, which if made available in time for disaster preparedness and response purposes, can help save lives and minimize damage. With a few exceptions, however, state-of-the-art data management information systems (DMIS) available in most countries do not provide adequate support for search, discovery, access and use of data and information residing in independent sources across institutional boundaries. This paper describes architecture and design of a distributed middleware-level framework, called Virtual Repository (VR), together with functionalities and structures of its key components. By leveraging linked data and related technologies and tools, VR aims to eliminate this limitation. Two applications, Mobile Assistant for Disasters (MAD) and Automatic Disaster Alert System for Tourists (ADAST) are described to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of VR

No abstract

Typical state-of-the-art disaster management information systems (DMIS) cannot support responsive discovery and access of data and information needed to handle unforeseen emergencies. Adding semantics and relations to legacy data and transforming them to linked data (LD) can remove this limitation. The virtual repository presented in this article is a development environment for this purpose: It provides application developers with tools for incremental transformation of legacy data and information in the DMIS into LD as needed by the applications. The virtual repository also provides the applications with support for runtime access of LD created and maintained using its tools.