Semantic technologies for civil information management during complex emergencies

Data sharing in support of situational awareness during complex emergencies remains a challenge to effective response and recovery, despite the fact that significant technological advances have enabled robust mobile data collection capabilities that can operate in both connected and disconnected environments. Current solutions rely on disparate knowledge silos that make situational awareness difficult for operations requiring collaboration to facilitate information sharing and to enable performance tracking for optimal resource allocation. In our paper we discuss the benefits of applying mobile enabled semantic technologies for supporting civil information management (CIM) during complex emergencies and analytically investigate the technical challenges encountered in such efforts. Specifically, we will present research related to developing a Civil Information Management Semantic Wiki (CIM Wiki), built on the Semantic MediaWiki platform. This CIM Wiki is a knowledge portal that enables users to collect, organize, tag, search, browse, visualize, and share structured CIM knowledge.