Keynote talk given during the 9th Conf. on Artificial Intelligence in Security and Defence, AISD2019, Beirut, 26th-29th March, 2019 ---- Open data in disaster management The UN General Assembly defined in February 2017 a disaster as “A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts. It is deeply intertwined with the broader concept of risks, defined by the European commission as a “combination of the probability of occurrence of a hazard generating harm in a given scenario and the severity of that harm.” Managing these uncertainties requires a large spectrum of data coming from different sources, government being one of the most important. Open Government Data (OGD) is a philosophy and a set of policies that promotes transparency, accountability and value creation by making government data available to all. According to the OGD 8 principles, defined in 2007, Sebastopol, California, these data should be: complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary, license-free. One goal of Open Government Data is to rise the interest of third-parties stakeholders and their (open) innovation capabilities, Open Data is providing trusted information which is important in a troubled context, with a lot of rumors (see also the emergence of fake news). As governments are among the largest data creators and providers, OGD is a central issue for disaster management or risk mitigation, for example through the provision of costly and/or rare data, like data related to infrastructures, weather data or satellite imagery. By definition, OGD is contributing to remove the data silos created by the different information systems of different bodies of government, administration or external stakeholders, allowing a cross-boundary information sharing. It is also a tool to improve cooperation among stakeholders in case of emergency. All of this is of paramount importance regarding disaster management. Through a set of use cases, this talk will highlight (1) how OGD has been or could be used during the whole of the disaster management cycle, from prevention and preparedness, emergency management, response, and recovery; (2) its current or potential benefits and possible improvements through its linkage with other sources of information, structured and unstructured, such social media and crowdsourcing ; and (3) its identified barriers regarding data availability and quality, organizational readiness, multi-stakeholders involvement, and cooperation.

1. Slim Turki, Dr.
slim.turki@list.lu
@sl_tu
Open Data in
Disaster Management

2. Research and Technology Organization (RTO)
Develops innovative and competitive solutions in response to the
key needs of Luxembourgish and European companies.
• Employees: ~600 | Budget: EUR 66 millions
• Activities:
• Fundamental and applied scientific research, development of knowledge
and competences;
• Experimental development, incubation and transfer of new technologies,
competences, products and services;
• Scientific support to the policies of the Luxembourgish government,
businesses and society in general;
• Doctoral and post-doctoral training, in partnership with universities.
LUXEMBOURG INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE
AND TECHNOLOGY
2
Interdisciplinary portfolios
• Smart cities
• Spatial sector
• Industry 4.0
• FinTech and RegTech
Fields of activity
• Ecological innovation
• Digital innovation
• Materials innovation

3. • Share-PSI 2.0 (ICT-PSP, 2013-2016)
• Collection of best practices and
definition of recommendations for
public sector information release in
Europe.
• BE-GOOD (Building an Ecosystem to
Generate Opportunities in Open Data,
Interreg NEW, 2016-2020)
• LIST technical partner, data release,
re-users engagement, Public-Private
Partnerships, innovative procurement,
impact assessment.
• ISLAND (Impact of open data in
Luxembourg (2017 - ongoing)
• Studies for the Government of
Luxembourg
• Open Data: Barriers, Risks, and
Opportunities
• Open Data and Metadata quality
• How Open Data Are Turned into
Services?
• Value generation from open data:
actors, challenges and business
models
• How Open Data Ecosystems Are
Stimulated?
Addressed questionsProjects
Our ODYSSEY since 2012
Open Data for a Smarter Society
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4. • Disaster
• Serious disruption of the functioning of a
community or a society at any scale due to
hazardous events interacting with
conditions of exposure, vulnerability and
capacity, leading to one or more of the
following: human, material, economic and
environmental losses and impacts
• Disaster management
• Organization, planning and application of
measures preparing for, responding to and
recovering from disasters.
• Philosophy and set of policies that promote
transparency, accountability and value
creation by making government data
available to all.
• Open Governement Data (OGD)
• (2007) Data should be: complete, primary,
timely, accessible, machine processable,
non-discriminatory, non-proprietary, license-
free.
• Open Data
• Data that can be freely used, re-used and
redistributed by anyone - subject only, at
most, to the requirement to attribute and
sharealike.
DISASTER MANAGEMENT & OPEN DATA
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5. Mitigation Long-term or sustained goal to improve resilience to reduce or eliminate the
impact of an incident in the future; e.g. through regulation or education
Preparedness Process of enhancing capacity to respond to an incident by taking steps to
ensure personnel and entities are capable of responding to incidents, such
as training, planning, exercising, procuring resources and intelligence and
surveillance to incidents.
Response Immediate actions to save lives, protect property and the environment,
such as evacuation, deployment of resources and establishment of incident
command operations;
Recovery Restore essential services and repair damages.
DISASTER MANAGEMENT CYCLE
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6. HURRICANE KATRINA, AUGUST 2005
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At least 1,836 people died in the hurricane and
subsequent floods, one of the deadliest US hurricanes
Total property damage estimated at $125 billion

7. • “Lack of information sharing across levels of government and sectors”
• “contribute to slower and uncoordinated response and insufficient deployment of
resources”
• “Accessing even basic government data involved a formal public-records
request and often came with restrictive data-sharing agreements”
• “Data were not available in their entirety — in a structured, machine-readable,
“open” format — citizens couldn’t download, analyze, or innovate on these data
sets”
• “Technologists started writing programs to extract data from government
websites.
• “Neighborhood residents and legions of volunteers organized field data-
collection efforts to document the condition of storm-damaged buildings.
• “This became the first-ever catalog of open data for the U.S. Government”
• Open Government Directive issued in 2009, instructed U.S. agencies to open
up their data.
Some testimonials
HURRICANE KATRINA, AUGUST 2005
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8. • Contemporary incidents more and more
complex
• Responses exceed the capacity of any one
agency and require coordination with other
agencies to interact together, involve
multiple jurisdictions, governmental
ministries, departments and agencies,
NGOs, private sector entities, and citizens.
• Require to increase information sharing
capability”
• Disaster risk information
• Comprehensive information on all
dimensions of disaster risk, including
hazards, exposure, vulnerability and
capacity, related to persons, communities,
organizations and countries and their assets
• Some critical infrastructure data
• transportation, health care, financial
services, weather and agricultural
conditions, population and housing trends,
characteristics of the society from a
geographical perspective
• Authorities are among the largest creators,
collectors and consumers of data
TRANS-ORGANISATION COOPERATION
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9. • Cape Town – 2018 Severe Drought
• Financial transparency
• “As months turned to years, people increasingly lost confidence in government
agencies and philanthropy. News reports on federal dollars going to the region
and donations coming intononprofits were abundant, but people looked at their
own stalled recovery and asked, “Where’s the money?” The lack of financial
transparency only added to the sense of uncertainty and suspicion”
TRANSPARENCY & TRUST
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10. RISKS AND BARRIERS RELATED TO DATA
OPENING
10 Open Data: Barriers, Risks, and Opportunities. Martin S., Foulonneau M. , S. Turki, Ihadjadene M., ECEG’2013, June 2013.

11. • “practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the
services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the
Internet.”
CROWDSOURCING
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A child maps her route from home to school.
The results are then digitized and aggregated
to produce a digital and anonymized
“heatmap” of the main routes to the school.
Thessaloniki
Resiliency Map highlights emergency-related
information: fire hydrants, shelters,
construction sites, car repair shops, and similar
PoI that influence how you navigate an area
after disaster strikes. Can be used to track
damage after an event.

12. DEDICATED OGD PORTALS FOR
DISASTER MANAGEMENT
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OnTheMap (USA) unified platform based on the spatial geographic map which in the data
publishing and data use phase it is published to the public via a wide variety of dissemination and
analysis tools, and in the data collection phase it
automatically incorporates real time data updates from the National Weather Service’s (NWS)
National Hurricane Center, Department of Interior (DOI), Department of Agriculture (DOA), and
FEMA.
inondations.lu, Flood Prediction Center Luxembourg - Permanent provision of measured
water levels and forecasts of watercourses in Luxembourg, as well as additional information
during flood warning times.

13. • Find patterns in historical data related to disasters or emergency situations, from
the prevention side
• Time-series
• Contributing to deal with ongoing emergencies with real time data
• Challenges:
• Contrasted picture: Governments are providing very accurate data (weather,
satellite imagery) very costly to gather otherwise, but at the same time are
releasing very large statistical data.
• Granularity: Statistical data opposed to fine data required to run the models
• need from governments to provide (maybe to create) lower granularity data.
• For ongoing emergencies
• need of ready (and validated) tools and real-time data: room for improvement.
LEVERAGING A.I. FOR DISASTER
MANAMGEMENT
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14. • Crossroads between OGD and private-held data of public interest
• Crossroads between OGD and NLP
• NLP methods allow to extract valuable information and to combine it with OGD
structured data
• Mostly attempted for social media data:
• Detection of emerging event
• Fine detection of location
• Still some issues, as a low F-score
LEVERAGING A.I. FOR DISASTER
MANAMGEMENT
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15. May-June 2016
MAJOR FLOODING IN THE LOIRET (FR)
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16. • Build a "common pot" of Open Data and make them more understandable in
everyday routine
• Design contest
BE-GOOD Challenge
CONTINUITY OF TRAFFIC FLOW
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#opendata

17. Over 400 open datasets gathered
• Geography: city, department, national, openstreetmap layers
• Transportation: roads, lines & stations, roadworks, real time public transportation
• Weather, environment: crowdsourced, real time, forecasts, history, risks areas
• Traffic disruptions: social networks, authorities, rescue bodies, roadworks
CONTINUITY OF TRAFFIC FLOW
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More than 40 meetings…

18. CONTINUITY OF TRAFFIC FLOW
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Multimodal routing
Informations about
traffic and environment
From official and
collaborative sources
Shared information for
professionals
Traffic and environment
conditions
Secured sharing, regulation
Sustainability:
- Data collection
- Open Data generation
- Business model
- Maintenance
- Balance between daily
life and emergency
situation
- Community engagement

19. 19
• Community engagement
• Citizen empowerment
• Service co-creation

20. • Upstream and downstream pollution tracing
BE-GOOD Challenge
WASTE WATER TRACING
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21. • Networks based on INSPIRE
Generic network
• Sewer Data
• Hydrography data
• Flemish Hydrographic Atlas
• Ownership = Flanders Environment
Agency
• Management = Provinces &
Flanders Environment Agency
• ArcMap Toolbar - editing
Link between networks
WASTE WATER TRACING
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22. • Tool - options
• Upstream and downstream tracing
• Dry weather
• Rainy weather (working overflow
structures)
• Combine information & quickly get an
overview
• Help first responders and authorities to get
an overview of a precarious situation
• Help sewer managers to better understand
their part in a bigger network
• Help with planning and renovation of sewer
infrastructure
WASTE WATER TRACING
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23. • “Si vis pacem, para bellum” - "If you want peace, prepare for war“
• Open data values
• Transparency and Trust
• Community engagement
• Trans-organization cooperation, inside and outside public organisation
• High Potential for AI
• Challenges in terms of availability, quantity, quality, granularity, etc.
CONCLUSIONS
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24. Slim Turki, Dr.
slim.turki@list.lu
@sl_tu
Open Data in
Disaster Management
Thank you for your attention