Information Management for
Crisis Response in WORKPAD
Alessandro Faraotti1, Antonella Poggi2,
Berardino Salvatore3, Guido Vetere1
(1) IBM Center for Advanced Studies of Rome
(2) Università di Roma \"La Sapienza\" Dipartimento di Informatica e
Sistemistica \"Antonio Ruberti\"
(3) IBM Rome Solutions Lab
6th International Conference on Information Systems
for Crisis Response and Management, Gothenburg, Sweden
May 10th – 13th 2009
ISCRAM 2009

Project summary
• EU SPECIFIC TARGETED RESEARCH OR INNOVATION PROJECT
(STREP) - FP6-2005-IST-5-034749
• An Adaptive Peer-to-Peer Software Infrastructure for Supporting
Collaborative Work of Human Operators in Emergency/Disaster
Scenarios
• Consortium
Università degli Studi di Roma LA SAPIENZA

Università degli Studi di Roma TOR VERGATA

IBM Center for Advanced Studies of Rome

Salzburg Research

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET WIEN

APIF MOVIQUITY S.A.

SOFTWARE 602 A.S. Research

Regione Calabria – Protezione Civile

• Start date: Sept. 2006
• Duration: 36 months
ISCRAM 2009

Goals
• Enhance current crisis response IT
infrastructures by developing an open innovative
platform (middleware, software, models)
• Support collaborative work of autonomous,
decentralized organizations, with both field and
back office forces, in a powerful, flexible and yet
(hopefully) simple way
• Reach a better understanding of key problems of
information integration\\exchange for crisis
management, and drive further research
ISCRAM 2009

State of the Art (Italy)
Provides
Collects data, information
Hierarchical, unstructured
plans and integration &
Central
coordinates exchange
IT information flows
Control
operations
Room
Command
Coordination Coordination
Few or no
Center Center
information flows
Interfaces
operating
Operating Operating Operating Operating
organization
Center Center Center Center
s
Few or no
Operative Operative Operative
IT
Control Room Control Room Control Room
Coordination
ISCRAM 2009

Requirements
• To effectively manage crises, many different organizations (fire
brigades, red cross, army, volunteers, etc) must reach a high
degree of coordination by timely exchange meaningful
information
• Response organizations have to manage unpredictable situations,
re-adjust priorities, collect information from multiple sources
and evaluate them, receive and transmit orders
• Because of complexity, integration cannot be completely
designed and implemented before real crises occur: “the value
of planning decreases with the increase of the events'
complexity” (Caesar Augustus)
ISCRAM 2009

Working Hypotheses
Peer to peer networking provides better robustness, dependability,

adaptability, and flexibility
No dependence on centralized infrastructures

Systems can dynamically enter and leave the network

Integration must be achieved by mapping heterogeneous

conceptualizations
No semantic standards (shared ontologies) in place

Critical updates must be notified to potentially interested parties

Asynchronous, query-time data integration is not enough

Need to supplement it with event-handling capabilities

ISCRAM 2009

The Proposed
Architecture P2P semantically
integrated network to
be dynamically set-up
for inter-organization
coordination purposes
ORK
NETW
ND
BACK-E MANET
Operating
Center
TWOR
Coordination Operative
ND NE
ONT-E
Center Control Room
Reliable BE-FE
FR
link
Central Coordination
Operating Control Center
Center
ORK Room
NETW
END
RONT-
Mobile ad-hoc
networks of
Operating
Operative devices
Center
Control Room
MANET Coordination
Center
ISCRAM 2009

P2P semantic integration
• Centralized information integration systems based on mediators provide:
Ontology (global view)

Mappings of O with source DB schemes (GAV, LAV, GLAV)

Certain answers over the first-order structure O+M+DB(s)

• In P2P environments, each system (peer) acts both as source and mediator
First-order semantics is inadequate (as long as mapping is free) [Halevy

& al, 03]
Need to resort on multi-modal (epistemic) logic [Calvanese & al, 03]

Main issues

 Decidability, tractability
 Logical soundness & completeness
 Network-wide naming
ISCRAM 2009

How WORKPAD’s semantic
integration works \\ 1
1. Each node exports an ontology (UML, DL-Lite, OWL2-
conjunctive query
QL)
● City is_a Place(NAME)
2. Semantic mappings (GAV) with data sources are
WS manifest ontology
manifest ntolo
established
● CAPITAL(ID) → City(lookup(ID))
● TOWN(NM) → City(lookup(NM)) reasoning &
query mgr
3. Individual terms are mapped by specific functions
mappings notification
(e.g. string manipulation, lookup) mgr
4. Queries are conjunctions expressed in terms of
ontology concepts
● x,y | Place(x), NAME(x,y)
DB
5. Queries get reformulated in terms of source schemes
or other ontologies, based on mappings
ISCRAM 2009

How WORKPAD’s semantic
integration works \\ 2
6. Suitable sub-queries are propagated to wrapped conjunctive query
information sources, either local or remote
7. Consistency of local data is up to local DBMS
WS manifest ontology
manifest ntolo
8. Network data items get integrated based on a
“doxastic approach” [Vetere & al, 08]
● No direct “knowledge transfer” reasoning &
query mgr
● Knowledge integration rules mappings notification
● Reasoning on data provenance and majorities mgr
9.Updates are propagated through a publish-
subscribe mechanism
● Notifications of updates may be used to optimize
DB
data access or raise alerts
ISCRAM 2009

More on notification
management
WORKPAD peers should support a specific subscription service
•
notify
Any client (either a WORKPAD peer P or an external
•
application) that is interested in receiving updates from a peer
P', must implement a specific notification endpoint, which P'
will use when notifying updates
Subscription topics are defined with respect to the publisher’s
•
ontology (concept, role, and attributes)
WORKPAD prototypical implementation provides own point-to-
•
subscribe
point notification capabilities, with basic features such as
message persistence, delivery and retry mappings notificat
ion mgr
Event management infrastructures can be leveraged if
•
available
ISCRAM 2009

Inside a WORKPAD Peer
ISCRAM 2009

How to set up a Peer
1. Pick up an ontology and extend
it if needed, or develop a new
one
2. Map it with your local DBMS
3. Identify other peers
4. Map other peers' ontologies
with the local one
5. Subscribe for updates you are
interest in
6. Iterate on previous steps if
needed
ISCRAM 2009

Conclusion
• WORKPAD information platform is designed to semantically integrate control
rooms, headquarters, civil protection organizations in a P2P way
Simple, robust, dependable, standards-based framework

Decentralized semantic integration

Endpoint based event handling

• What we achieved
A better understanding of crisis related information management

A formal framework including new paradigms of Information Integration

A prototypical running implementation based on Web Services

• What we plan
Refine the formal framework

Refine the implementation to provide an industrial-strength solution

Provide a concrete roll-out

ISCRAM 2009

Thanks
WORKPAD
www.workpad-project.eu
More details: IEEE Internet Computing, January/February
2008 (Vol. 12, No. 1) pp. 26-37
ISCRAM 2009