Community Driven Data Integration for Emergency Response

This paper describes our work in progress on an approach and technology for providing integrated data access in situational awareness applications – particularly for disaster and emergency response. The key new aspect of our work is an approach where information aggregation, processing, and integration capabilities are offered as a service to any new application builder. Further, we provide a framework for possibly reusing prior information integration knowledge, the development of which demands the major fraction of time and complexity in a new application, in a customized fashion for new application. Our overall goal is to provide a framework where integrated access to critical data in an emergency response situation can be enabled very rapidly and by personnel with basic IT and data handling expertise. Our approach, while general purpose, is currently motivated by and grounded in the context of situational awareness systems for incident commander decision support in the fire response domain.