Communication and tracking ontology development for civilians earthquake disaster assistance

One of the most important components of recovery and speedy response during and immediately after an earthquake disaster is a communication and tracking which possibly capable of discovering affected peoples and connects them with their families, friends, and communities with first responders and/or to support computational systems. With the capabilities of current mobile technologies, we believed that it can be a smart earthquake disaster tools aid to help people in this situation. Ontologies are becoming crucial parts to facilitate an effective communication and coordination across different parties and domains in providing assistance during earthquake disasters, especially where affected locations are remote, affected population is large and centralized coordination is poor. Several existing competing methodologies give guidelines as how ontology may be built, there are no single right ways of building an ontology and no standard of Disaster Relief Ontology exist, although separated related ontologies may be combined to create an initial version. This article discusses the ongoing development of an ontology for a Communication and Tracking System (CTS), based on existing related ontologies, that is aimed to be used by mobile phone applications to support earthquake disaster relief at the real-time

empathi: An ontology for Emergency Managing and Planning about Hazard Crisis

In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors and social media content generated by local people. A bold obstacle to capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts concerning with the domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises. Although empathi has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary concepts and relations being essential in this domain. This ontology is available at https://w3id.org/empathi/

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Communication and Tracking Ontology Development for Civilians Earthquake Disaster Assistance

ABSTRACT One of the most important components of recovery and speedy response during and immediately after an earthquake disaster is a communication and tracking which possibly capable of discovering affected peoples and connects them with their families, friends, and communities with first responders and/or to support computational systems. With the capabilities of current mobile technologies, we believed that it can be a smart earthquake disaster tools aid to help people in this situation. Ontologies are becoming crucial parts to facilitate an effective communication and coordination across different parties and domains in providing assistance during earthquake disasters, especially where affected locations are remote, affected population is large and centralized coordination is poor. Several existing competing methodologies give guidelines as how ontology may be built, there are no single right ways of building an ontology and no standard of Disaster Relief Ontology exist, although separated related ontologies may be combined to create an initial version. This article discusses the ongoing development of an ontology for a Communication and Tracking System (CTS), based on existing related ontologies, that is aimed to be used by mobile phone applications to support earthquake disaster relief at the real-time

Geospatial crowdsourced data fitness analysis for spatial data infrastructure based disaster management actions

The reporting of disasters has changed from official media reports to citizen reporters who are at the disaster scene. This kind of crowd based reporting, related to disasters or any other events, is often identified as 'Crowdsourced Data' (CSD). CSD are freely and widely available thanks to the current technological advancements. The quality of CSD is often problematic as it is often created by the citizens of varying skills and backgrounds. CSD is considered unstructured in general, and its quality remains poorly defined. Moreover, the CSD's location availability and the quality of any available locations may be incomplete. The traditional data quality assessment methods and parameters are also often incompatible with the unstructured nature of CSD due to its undocumented nature and missing metadata. Although other research has identified credibility and relevance as possible CSD quality assessment indicators, the available assessment methods for these indicators are still immature. In the 2011 Australian floods, the citizens and disaster management administrators used the Ushahidi Crowd-mapping platform and the Twitter social media platform to extensively communicate flood related information including hazards, evacuations, help services, road closures and property damage. This research designed a CSD quality assessment framework and tested the quality of the 2011 Australian floods' Ushahidi Crowdmap and Twitter data. In particular, it explored a number of aspects namely, location availability and location quality assessment, semantic extraction of hidden location toponyms and the analysis of the credibility and relevance of reports. This research was conducted based on a Design Science (DS) research method which is often utilised in Information Science (IS) based research. Location availability of the Ushahidi Crowdmap and the Twitter data assessed the quality of available locations by comparing three different datasets i.e. Google Maps, OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines' (QDNRM) road data. Missing locations were semantically extracted using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and gazetteer lookup techniques. The Credibility of Ushahidi Crowdmap dataset was assessed using a naive Bayesian Network (BN) model commonly utilised in spam email detection. CSD relevance was assessed by adapting Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) relevance assessment techniques which are also utilised in the IT sector. Thematic and geographic relevance were assessed using Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency Vector Space Model (TF-IDF VSM) and NLP based on semantic gazetteers. Results of the CSD location comparison showed that the combined use of non-authoritative and authoritative data improved location determination. The semantic location analysis results indicated some improvements of the location availability of the tweets and Crowdmap data; however, the quality of new locations was still uncertain. The results of the credibility analysis revealed that the spam email detection approaches are feasible for CSD credibility detection. However, it was critical to train the model in a controlled environment using structured training including modified training samples. The use of GIR techniques for CSD relevance analysis provided promising results. A separate relevance ranked list of the same CSD data was prepared through manual analysis. The results revealed that the two lists generally agreed which indicated the system's potential to analyse relevance in a similar way to humans. This research showed that the CSD fitness analysis can potentially improve the accuracy, reliability and currency of CSD and may be utilised to fill information gaps available in authoritative sources. The integrated and autonomous CSD qualification framework presented provides a guide for flood disaster first responders and could be adapted to support other forms of emergencies

The Acceptance of Using Information Technology for Disaster Risk Management: A Systematic Review

The numbers of natural disaster events are continuously affecting human and the world economics. For coping with disaster, several sectors try to develop the frameworks, systems, technologies and so on. However, there are little researches focusing on the usage behavior of Information Technology (IT) for disaster risk management (DRM). Therefore, this study investigates the affecting factors on the intention to use IT for mitigating disaster’s impacts. This study conducted a systematic review with the academic researches during 2011-2018. Two important factors from the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and others are used in describing individual behavior. In order to investigate the potential factors, the technology platforms are divided into nine types. According to the findings, computer software such as GIS applications are frequently used for simulation and spatial data analysis. Social media is preferred among the first choices during disaster events in order to communicate about situations and damages. Finally, we found five major potential factors which are Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU), information accessibility, social influence, and disaster knowledge. Among them, the most essential one of using IT for disaster management is PU, while PEOU and information accessibility are more important in the web platforms

Weakly-supervised Fine-grained Event Recognition on Social Media Texts for Disaster Management

People increasingly use social media to report emergencies, seek help or share information during disasters, which makes social networks an important tool for disaster management. To meet these time-critical needs, we present a weakly supervised approach for rapidly building high-quality classifiers that label each individual Twitter message with fine-grained event categories. Most importantly, we propose a novel method to create high-quality labeled data in a timely manner that automatically clusters tweets containing an event keyword and asks a domain expert to disambiguate event word senses and label clusters quickly. In addition, to process extremely noisy and often rather short user-generated messages, we enrich tweet representations using preceding context tweets and reply tweets in building event recognition classifiers. The evaluation on two hurricanes, Harvey and Florence, shows that using only 1-2 person-hours of human supervision, the rapidly trained weakly supervised classifiers outperform supervised classifiers trained using more than ten thousand annotated tweets created in over 50 person-hours.Comment: In Proceedings of the AAAI 2020 (AI for Social Impact Track). Link: https://aaai.org/ojs/index.php/AAAI/article/view/539

SEMA4A : a knowledge base for accessible evacuation and alert notifications in emergencies

When an emergency occurs or is going to occur, the aim of organizations and agencies involved in the response phase is to restore quickly a safe situation and reduce the number of victims and damages. The notification of information about the kind of emergency, its characteristics, the location of safe places and available procedures for reaching them has a crucial role in order to facilitate the evacuation of citizens. Several organizations and agencies have been promoting the development of Information Technology (IT) tools, called Emergency Response Information Systems (ERIS) for the management of the activities performed in response to the emergencies. In particular, these systems provide modules for collecting, updating and notifying information about imminent disasters to potential affected people. Such notifications can be communicated through different channels, like websites, emails, text or voice messages. But to effectively inform people about an emergency, the notifications should be adapted automatically to each user’s profile (e.g. functional or contextual disabilities, elderly, children), the kind of emergency (e.g. typhoon, earthquake, tornado), the communication channel (e.g. PDAs, smartphones, pagers) and any other exceptional circumstances (e.g. interrupted roads, collapsed exit, dangerous area). For example, when a fire occurs in a building, a blind person should be alerted by audio signals or text messages (assuming she has a text-to-speech software on her device). Moreover, information can guide her to an assistant that can help her in reaching the exit. The efficacy of emergency notifications depends also on how different Emergency Notification Systems (ENS) communicate and interoperate with each other in order to share information even with different terminologies and types of disasters. For avoiding semantic incompatibilities, a common language is needed to improve the coordination not only among systems, but also among users. In fact, codifying the semantics of shared information in an accessible way could help citizens in interpreting notifications without misunderstandings and emergency operators in communicating among them. Modelling knowledge on alerting and evacuation processes, using expert systems, neural networks or ontologies, can help in personalizing emergency notifications and evacuation procedures. In particular, we posit that the knowledge base required for the personalization mechanism should cover at least four domains: accessibility, technology, emergency and evacuation procedures. These domains cover the factors to take into account for adapting the notifications. Consequently, the accessibility is considered a representation for the user’s profile, technology for the interactive devices and the communication channel, emergency for the characteristics of the situation and evacuation procedures for the escaping measures. In this thesis, we propose the design of an ontology called SEMA4A (Simple Emergency Alerts 4 [for] All). The ontology is a knowledge representation based on semantic rules that allows to model articulated knowledge through the definition of complex relations among concepts from different domains. This choice is also related to the possibility of using specific tools based on first order logic for verifying the validity and the integrity of the proposed representation. The development of the ontology has to meet the objectives that motivated this research work: consistency, completeness, understandability and interoperability with existent systems and protocols. For the consistency, we have run a reasoner tool called Pellet obtaining that there are not redundancies and the mapping is syntactically coherent. Concerning completeness and understandability, we have performed a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation. The goal of the quantitative evaluation is to compute three well-known functions in the domain of ontological engineering: precision, coverage and accuracy. These three measures evaluate how much the ontology is representative respect to the domains of interest (i.e. accessibility, emergency, evacuation and technology). In the qualitative evaluation, we have involved international experts in accessibility, evacuation and emergency to test the validity of the proposed mapping with respect to their expertise. Finally, the interoperability has been guaranteed codifying SEMA4A with a standard language called OWL (Ontology Web Language) and following formal recommendations published as an initiative of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Taking into account the results obtained from the evaluations, we posit that the proposed ontology addresses needed information for sharing and integrating alert notifications about emergencies and evacuation procedures into existent solutions (i.e. notification mechanisms, information systems, communication protocols). As proof of this, we have developed three use cases in collaboration with the DEI Group of the University Carlos III of Madrid. SEMA4A has been applied for adapting available information considering several factors: the user’s profile, the kind of emergency, the communication channel and other exceptional circumstances. The first use case, called CAPONES, sends emergency alerts adapting the content and the visualization to the needs of involved users. The second system is NERES which aims at generating and notifying personalized evacuation routes. The last case is the EmergenSYS platform that provides three different mobile tools for sending alerts in two directions: from citizens to emergency operators and from emergency operators to citizens. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Durante una emergencia, el objetivo de las organizaciones y agencias involucradas es de responder a la misma para restaurar rápidamente una situación segura y reducir el número de las víctimas y los daños. En este ámbito es fundamental enviar a los ciudadanos afectados notificaciones sobre la emergencia especificando el tipo, las características, la ubicación de los lugares seguros y cómo llegar a ellos. De esta forma se pueden facilitar el desalojo y la evacuación de la área peligrosa. Varias organizaciones y agencias han estado colaborando en el desarrollo de los Sistemas Informativos para la Gestión de Emergencias (SIGEs). Estos sistemas proporcionan deferentes servicios basados en las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC). Uno de ellos es la gestión de la información relacionada con la situación y su consecuente notificación a los ciudadanos a través de diferentes canales, como por ejemplo sitios web, correos electrónicos, mensajes de voz y texto. Para que las notificaciones sean efectivas, es necesario proporcionar un mecanismo de personalización que adapte automáticamente la información a enviar teniendo en cuenta el perfil de cada usuario (por ejemplo, discapacidades funcionales o contextuales, ancianos y niños), el tipo de emergencia (por ejemplo, incendios, terremotos y tornados), el canal de comunicación (por ejemplo dispositivos móviles, dispositivos inteligentes y correo electrónicos) y cualquier otra circunstancia que se pueda considerar relevante (por ejemplo, carreteras cortadas o colapsadas y zonas peligrosas). Por ejemplo, cuando se produce un incendio en un edificio, una persona invidente puede ser alertada por una señal audio o un mensaje de texto si tiene instalado en su teléfono un convertidor de texto a voz. No solo el tipo de alerta, si no también el contenido de la misma tiene que adaptarse. En el caso del invidente, la información recibida le guiará hacia un asistente que le pueda ayudar a llegar a la salida. La eficacia de las notificaciones de emergencia depende también de cómo los diferentes SIGEs comunican y colaboran entre sí con el fin de compartir información. En este caso, hay que tener en cuenta que cada sistema podría utilizar una terminología diferente. Para evitar cualquier incompatibilidad semántica, se necesita un lenguaje común con el objetivo de mejorar la comunicación no sólo entre los SIGEs, sino también hacia los usuarios. De esta forma, se evitarían posibles malentendidos en la interpretación de la información recibida por parte de los ciudadanos y compartida entre los operadores de emergencia. Una posible solución a esta necesidad consiste en modelar el conocimiento sobre las alertas de emergencias y los procesos de evacuación desarrollando un sistema basado en la inteligencia artificial, como por ejemplo sistemas expertos, redes neuronales u ontologías. En particular, se considera que el conocimiento a modelar necesario para definir el mecanismo de personalización debería cubrir por lo menos lo siguientes cuatros dominios: accesibilidad , tecnología, emergencia y evacuación. Cada uno de estos dominios representa un factor especifico de la personalización. La accesibilidad se refiere a las características definidas en el perfil del usuario. La tecnología contiene los tipos de dispositivos y el canal utilizados para recibir información. La emergencia representa todo lo que se conoce sobre la situación critica mientras la evacuación incluye los procedimientos y las medidas a tomar para evacuar. En esta tesis, se propone el diseño de una ontología llamada SEMA4A (Simple Emergency Alerts 4 [for] All, Alertas de Emergencias Simples para Todos). La ontología es una representación de una área de conocimiento basada en la definición de reglas semánticas. A través de estas reglas, es posible definir modelos complejos que relacionen conceptos provenientes de diferentes dominios. Además, el uso de ontologías nos permite aplicar una serie de herramientas basadas en la lógica del primer orden para verificar la validez y la integridad de la representación resultante. El diseño de la ontología tiene que cumplir con los objetivos que han motivado este trabajo: la coherencia, la integridad, la comprensión y la interoperabilidad con los sistemas y los protocolos existentes. Cada una de estas propiedades ha sido evaluada utilizando técnicas especificas. Para la coherencia, se ha utilizado un razonador llamado Pellet. El resultado obtenido confirma que la definición de los conceptos y de las relaciones incluidas en SEMA4A ses semanticamente coherente. En cuanto a la integridad y la comprensión, hemos realizado dos tipos de evaluación: una cuantitativa y otra cualitativa. El objetivo de la evaluación cuantitativa es calcular tres funciones ya conocidas en el campo de la ingeniería ontológica: cover, accuracy y precision. Estas funciones nos permiten medir cuanto la ontología es representativa para los dominios de interés. En el ámbito de la evaluación cualitativa, hemos involucrado a expertos internacionales en materia de accesibilidad, evacuación y emergencia para qué opinen sobre SEMA4A y su valor respecto a la experiencia propia de cada uno. Por último, se ha cumplido con la interoperabilidad implementando SEMA4A con un lenguaje estándar llamado OWL (Ontology Web Language, Lenguaje Web para Ontologías) y siguiendo las lineas guías publicadas como iniciativa de la W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Teniendo en cuenta los resultados obtenidos al finalizar las evaluaciones, finalmente podemos afirmar que la ontología propuesta en esta tesis puede ser utilizada por otros SIGEs para personalizar y compartir la información disponible sobre situaciones de emergencia y procedimientos de evacuación. Como prueba de ello, hemos desarrollado tres casos de uso en colaboración con el Grupo de DEI de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. SEMA4A se ha aplicado como parte del mecanismo de adaptación de la información disponible teniendo en cuenta el perfil del usuario, el tipo de emergencia, el canal de comunicación y otras circunstancias excepcionales. El primer caso de uso, llamado CAPONES, envía alertas de emergencia personalizando el contenido y la visualización del mensaje (texto, imágenes o realidad aumentada) para mejor cumplir con las necesidades de los usuarios involucrados. El segundo sistema es NERES cuyo objetivo es adaptar y notificar las rutas de evacuación respecto al plano de emergencia oficial. El último caso es la plataforma EmergenSYS que ofrece tres aplicaciones móviles diferentes. La primera permite a los ciudadanos de notificar incidentes al centro de operaciones en calidad de testigos o victimas. La segunda es un botón de pánico que el ciudadano puede presionar para que automáticamente llegue una notificación al centro de operaciones. La tercera permite a los ciudadanos recibir información útil acerca de una emergencia cercana, incluyendo también la ruta de evacuación personalizada