A collaboration platform for data sharing among heterogeneous relief organizations for disaster management

Recently, we are witnessing the progressive increase in the occurrence of largescale disasters, characterized by an overwhelming scale and number of causalities. After 72 hours from the disaster occurrence, the damaged area is interested by assessment, reconstruction and recovery actions from several heterogeneous organizations, which need to collaborate and being orchestrated by a centralized authority. This situation requires an effective data sharing by means of a proper middleware platform able to let such organizations to interoperate despite of their differences. Although international organizations have defined collaboration frameworks at the higher level, there is no ICT supporting platform at operational level able to realize the data sharing demanded by such collaborative frameworks. This work proposes a layered architecture and a preliminary implementation of such a middleware for messaging, data and knowledge management. We also illustrate a demonstration of the usability of such an implementation, so as to show the achievable interoperability.