Safety check: a semantic web application for emergency management

Abstract

Semantic Computing is being used in a wide variety of domains to develop intelligent applications. With the increasing availability of different kinds of data on the web, providing better emergency management in case of natural disasters and humanitarian crises is much needed. This paper presents the use of semantic technologies to build a web application called Safety Check. The aim of this work is to implement a knowledge intensive application that identifies those people that may have been affected due to natural disasters or man-made disasters at any geographical location and notify them with safety instructions. This involves extraction of data from various sources for emergency alerts, weather alerts, and contacts data. The extracted data is integrated using a semantic data model and transformed into semantic data. Semantic reasoning was done through rules and queries.