Towards a unified infrastructure for automated management and integration of heterogeneous Geo-datasets in disaster response

Disaster response actors and decision makers need to perform several tasks and decisions in a short time. Handling such tasks requires access to sufficient, relevant and up-to-date datasets. Some of these datasets are static such as road network infrastructure and map of buildings. While several other kind of required information are dynamic and change during the occurrence of disaster. Such information may include number of casualties, wind speed, wind direction, road obstacles, etc. Semantic integration of various sources of information is the key to making efficient and fast actions by the actors in the filed as well as top-level decision makers. In this paper, we elaborate on the research challenges of data integration from multiple heterogeneous sources by proposing the system architecture of ASSIST (Access, Semantic Search and Integration Service and Translation). The paper concludes with discussing the future work on this smart service.