The Crisis Information Platform, as described in previous blog entries on this site, consists of a SOAP backend, with an public accessible REST API. Another major part is the data representation, that is specified in RDFS/OWL. From the user representation to the representation of crisis, all data is defined as RDF Schema (partially if needed in OWL). If possible, existing ontologies are used and combined with Sigimera internally ontologies:
- crisis.owl (prefix: crisis): Defines the schema of a crisis and related data. (Used third party ontology at the instance level: DuplinCore, FriendOfAFriend, … )
- on-site.owl (prefix: on-site): Defines agents that act in a crisis, such as Rescuer, Victims, Drones. Currently this ontology is not used in the first release.
- admin.owl (prefix: admin): Administration Ontology that defines Subscriber and missing properties for user handling.
The core concept is crisis:CrisisArea for a crisis entity (with crisis:DangerousZone for secondary crisis in the same area) and foaf:Agent for user that are related to one or more crisis and/or registered at our platform.
As triplestore OWLIM-Lite is used (for crisis information). The reason was the inferencing engine on default rule sets (OWL-Horst, OWL-DL, RDFS, …) and the possibility to extend this rule sets with own inferencing rules. One big challenge in the future will be the scalability of the triplestore when the number of triples and/or when the number of access per second rises. A solution is on the way…
More Information: [not-public]
About Alex Oberhauser
Alex Oberhauser’s current private and professional interests are Research and Development in the area of Semantic Web and Service Oriented Architecture with the focus on the applicability of new technologies in real world scenarios. He is founder of the meta project Networld and the Crisis Information Platform Sigimera (http://www.sigimera.org).
