The increasing interconnections of city services, the explosion of available urban data, and the need for multidisciplinary analysis and decision making for city sustainability require new technological solutions to cope with such complexity. Ontologies have become viable and effective tools to practitioners for developing applications requiring data and process interoperability, big data management, and automated reasoning on knowledge. We investigate how and to what extent ontologies have been used to support smart city services and we provide a comprehensive reference on what problems have been addressed and what has been achieved so far with ontology-based applications. To this purpose, we conducted a systematic literature review finalized to presenting the ontologies, and the methods and technological systems where ontologies play a relevant role in shaping current smart cities. Based on the result of the review process, we also propose a classification of the sub-domains of the city addressed by the ontologies we found, and the research issues that have been considered so far by the scientific community. We highlight those for which semantic technologies have been mostly demonstrated to be effective to enhance the smart city concept and, finally, discuss in more details about some open problems.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5578/pdf

Smart City Ontologies and Their Applications: A Systematic Literature Review

Efficient rescue operations require a high level of situation awareness amongst decision‐makers and first responders for the purpose of achieving operations successfully and reducing losses. Moreover, a common operational picture between involved actors is required in order to support decision‐making. Therefore, different organisations and agencies have to collaborate, cooperate, and coordinate their actions with each other. Hence, effective interactions and communications between participants are vital to fulfil these essential needs. However, emergency actors still lack backing to exchange information effectively and ensure a common operational picture in order to reach shared situational awareness. For this reason, we aim to develop and implement Rescue MODES, a communication system oriented to support situation awareness amongst French emergency actors in rescue operations. In this paper, we examine and analyse actors’ activities and interactions, so that the system will be based on the real needs of actors. We start by studying and modelling the communications, interactions, and information flow. This modelling is based on an application ontology. Then, we define requirements for good communication in these operations and present some existing systems in France and how each system responds to these requirements.

/pdf/handling-effective-communication-to-support-awareness-in-17nf1cj749.pdf

Handling effective communication to support awareness in rescue operations

Up to now, the world has witnessed how inadequate communication capabilities can adversely affect disaster response efforts. There are various Emergency Responders (ERs) that potentially must work together towards a successful resolution of the disaster. However, the different terminologies and technical vocabularies that are being exchanged between the ERs may lead to a misunderstanding and lack of semantic integrity. Yet, understanding the semantics of the exchanged data is one of the major challenges. The purpose of this work is to define the complex knowledge of the ERs by proposing a common and modular ontology shared by all the stakeholders so as to come up with a common shared vocabulary in order to ensure semantic interoperability between ERs. In this paper, we present POLARISCO and we discuss how it was developed using Basic Formal Ontology as an upperlevel ontology and Common Core Ontology as a mid-level ontology to define each module.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02487086/document

A Modular Ontology for Semantically Enhanced Interoperability in Operational Disaster Response.

How disasters drive media channel preferences: Tracing news consumption before, during, and after Hurricane Harvey

Research on improved FAWT signal denoising method in evaluation of firefighter training efficacy based on sEMG

This work aims at developing a system that supports French firefighters in data interpretation during rescue operations. An application ontology is proposed based on existing crisis management ones and operational expertise collection. After that, a knowledge-based system will be developed and integrated in firefighters' environment. Our first studies are shown in this paper.

Data Interpretation Support in Rescue Operations: Application for French Firefighters.

Data Interpretation Support in Rescue Operations: Application for French Firefighters

In rescue operations, situation awareness is very critical to decision-makers and responders in order to reduce the bad consequences. Furthermore, a good collaboration between services and organizations is vital to achieve successful operations. Therefore, a good communication and information exchange between actors is crucial to meet these requirements. This work aims to enhance situation awareness in rescue operations by supporting communication and interaction between participating actors. To do that, we start by studying interactions, communication, and information flow. After that, we look forward to design and implement a communication system that will be used by rescuers and first responders. In this paper, we show our preliminary results in which we model the interactions.

Samer Chehade

Papers

Handling effective communication to support awareness in rescue operations

Data Interpretation Support in Rescue Operations: Application for French Firefighters.

Data Interpretation Support in Rescue Operations: Application for French Firefighters

Modelling Interactions in Rescue Operations