Abstract

Effective management of emergencies depends on timely information availability, reliability and intelligibility. To achieve this, different Command and Control (C2) Systems and Sensor Systems have to cooperate which would only be possible through interoperability. However, unless standards and well-defined specifications are used, the interoperability of these systems can be very complex. To address this challenge, in C2-SENSE Project, a “Profiling” approach will be used to achieve seamless interoperability by addressing all the layers of the communication stack in the security field. In this respect, C2-SENSE project's main objective is to develop a profile based Emergency Interoperability Framework by the use of existing standards and semantically enriched Web services to expose the functionalities of C2 Systems, Sensor Systems and other emergency/crisis management systems. This will be developed in three steps: (1) first, an Emergency Domain Inventory will be created by surveying existing standards, real life use cases of sensors, devices, C2 systems and emergency management architectures for different scenarios in security field.  (2) Based on this inventory, a common Emergency Domain Ontology will be developed to gather all stakeholders' knowledge in a unique and flexible data model. (3) Finally, by using the concepts in this ontology, by also taking into account both functional and operational requirements as well as different countries' cultural, linguistic and legal issues, Emergency Interoperability Profiles that will constitute the framework will be developed. The necessary standardization activities will be initiated to evolve C2-SENSE Emergency Interoperability Framework into a standard specification for interoperability between Sensor Systems and C2 Systems. C2-SENSE will assess its outcomes in a realistic “Flood Scenario in Italy” pilot to ensure that the developed technologies are generic and applicable in a real life setting.