RES-Q: Toward Semantic Interoperability for Risk and Disaster Management in Smart Cities

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed new challenges in preserving the goal of developing smart and sustainable cities worldwide while improving urban resilience. In the smart city domain, disaster or crisis management operations require contributions and collaboration from different types of entities with various functions, rules, and protocols, forming complex contexts in decision-making or event coordination. The management of the corresponding information usually coming from multiple heterogeneous sources and sometimes with attributes revealing semantic inconsistencies constitutes an emerging challenge. Furthermore, the demand for interoperability between the various services and IoT devices at local and national level is imperative. Yet, existing literature highlights that the conceptualization of a holistic reference schema that covers all the dimensions of the smart city disaster/crisis management domain and allows the exchange of information through different agents has not been fully addressed so far. We present the RES-Q (RESCUE) semantic model, which includes the needed domain knowledge streams for the smart city crisis management domain. This model aims for data consolidation and linkage in order to be further utilized for the implementation of a common knowledge repository and advanced analysis. In this context, semantic web technologies are proposed as a promising solution for providing semantic interoperability in crisis and/or disaster management in the smart city discourse. Finally, data consolidation and harmonization methodology is presented, which is used for the integration of different data sources, according to the RES-Q model. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.