Our INVEST4EXCELLENCE project partners submitted the book chapter entitled “RES-Q: Towards semantic interoperability for risk and disaster management in smart cities” which has been accepted for inclusion in the "Building on smart cities skills and competences" book published by Springer Nature.

The current research work has been developed within the RES-Q Living Lab under the framework of the INVEST4EXCELLENCE program and is part of the dissemination plan of the project.

AUTHORS

  • Omiros Iatrellis, Dept of Digital Systems, University of Thessaly, Larissa, Greece, iatrellis@uth.gr
  • Vasileios Kyriatzis, Dept of Digital Systems, University of Thessaly, Larissa, Greece, kyriatzis@uth.gr
  • Nicholas Samaras, Dept of Digital Systems, University of Thessaly, Larissa, Greece, nsamaras@uth.gr
  • Charalampos Dervenis, Dept of Business Administration, University of Thessaly, Larissa, Greece, dervenisch@uth.gr 

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 of different type 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, 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, which covers all the dimensions of the smart city disaster/crisis management domain and also allowing the information exchange 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 and 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 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.