ISWC 2014 Industry Track
iNowit, linked data as key element for innovation in emergency response


Bart van Leeuwen
bart@netage.nl / @semanticfire
Bart van Leeuwen combines his 15 years firefighting experience with 17 years of netage.nl
ownership. This combination allows him to highlight a new perspective on operational information
delivery.
With the ever larger amount of available data and changes in tactical approaches to firefighting new
and fresh thinking is needed. As a “outside the box” thinker he helps fire departments to approach
their information problems in a different way. In this process, technology is not the answer, it's an
enabler and should be treated as such.
Currently he leads an innovation project where proven information management technology is
combined with new paradigms like semantic web technology to deal with information flows in a
smarter and agile way.

Introduction
The iNowit Project for safety regions in the Netherlands was started in 2013, one of the key
elements is the use of Linked Data for terminology and data exchange as a driver for innovation.

Its a hot summer night somewhere on the Dutch German border, under the surface of a nature area
something is smoldering, a moor fire, covering both Dutch and German territory and requiring the
emergency services to work in a coordinated way together to prevent the nature area going up in
flames.
Connecting emergency response organizations on information level across country borders is a
huge challenge. Having multiple disciplines in multiple jurisdictions communicating in different
languages in the heat of the moment is a very interesting use case of semantic web technology and
linked data.

iNowit 2013
In the Netherlands the safety regions together with the national police are responsible for small and
large scale emergency response on Dutch territory. In 2013 the Dutch 'safety board' , responsible for
the safety regions, commissioned the iNowit project to boost innovation for information
management in both incident situations and day to day operations. One of the key components is
using linked data as a way to exchange formal definitions and as a data integration platform.

Netage was responsible for the initial implementation of the linked data elements of the platform:

­ 'Firebrary' , Fire Library, a SKOS­XL based terminology exchange platform.
­ A OSLC based API to interact with the terminology in the Firebrary.

During the project we not only gained experience with the technical details but also the more
organizational problems of creating a centralized terminologies. The first implementation of the
Firebrary was delivered in December 2013 and used by internal projects at various fire departments.
The remarks and experiences gained since then are now the basis for the iNowit 2014 project.
iNowit 2014
One of the primary motivations for starting the Firebrary project has been to be able to map and
compare definitions across disciplines and borders.
During large scale incidents GIS tools are used to position the operations on the map by the means
of symbols. Even between disciplines the same country the symbols are not universal or not even of
interest for all the disciplines.

For traffic coordination the police is only interested if a fire truck blocks the road, not what the
exact type of truck is.

The problem with current GIS tooling is that the presentation , the symbol on the map, and the
information, the data in GIS store, are completely separated. This means that it is very hard to
change the representation based on the type of user. If we are able to utilize the Firebrary for
matching and exchanging definitions of the underlying data we can draw maps which make sense to
the discipline that looks at it.

Together with the updates to the Firebrary this years iNowit project will focus on making the
connection between the presentation and data layer work better through linked data. Where the
standard approach with GIS and Linked Data is the use of GeoSparql we will focus on bringing
some linked data to the presentation layer through standards supported by general GIS tooling. This
way the current investments in both Geo warehouses and GIS tooling will not be to waist but more
advanced interfaces can leverage the extra bit of linked data.

The Dutch iNowit project also aimed on interacting with cross border initiatives focusing on linked
data and semantic web technology in emergency response:
Disaster and Disaster 2.0 both funded by the European Union FP7 framework and the W3C
Emergency Information Community Group.

During the talk I would like to highlight the current developments and the actual places where the
linked data parts of iNowit are actually used.

Remark
At the time of writing the iNowit 2014 project has not yet been started. We are looking forward in
sharing the actual work during ISWC 2014