EDVO: A "One-Station" Emergency Response Service Model Based on Ontology and Virtual Organization

Emergency response is a time critical work that needs team work from different organizations with various specialties. It also needs to integrate existing information system to collect and assemble necessary knowledge and resources for critical emerging tasks and use it for collaborative problem solving. As the amount of Web services in e-governments grows continuously, building virtual organization by composing services from heterogeneous information systems in different organizations is an effective method to satisfy the requirements of emergency event handling. A model presented in this paper is the main result of an on-going national science foundation project of china, called emergency-driven virtual organization (EDVO), which aims at building and developing an innovative software infrastructure (software, models, services, etc.) for supporting collaborative work of events handling in emergency response systems. The model is to describe all kinds of resources in unified semantics and make knowledge sharing among various systems possible. With this basis, related resources and services can be flexibly and dynamically organized as a virtual organization to handle different kinds of emergent events.