Collaborative knowledge as a service applied to the disaster management domain

Cloud computing offers services which promise to meet continuously increasing computing demands by using a large number of networked resources. However, data heterogeneity remains a major hurdle for data interoperability and data integration. In this context, a Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) approach has been proposed with the aim of generating knowledge from heterogeneous data and making it available as a service. In this paper, a Collaborative Knowledge as a Service (CKaaS) architecture is proposed, with the objective of satisfying consumer knowledge needs by integrating disparate cloud knowledge through collaboration among distributed KaaS entities. The NIST cloud computing reference architecture is extended by adding a KaaS layer that integrates diverse sources of data stored in a cloud environment. CKaaS implementation is domain-specific; therefore, this paper presents its application to the disaster management domain. A use case demonstrates collaboration of knowledge providers and shows how CKaaS operates with simulation models.