Towards an interoperable online volunteered geographic information system for disaster response

Although volunteered geographic information (VGI) (voluntarily provided crowd-sourcing spatial data) applications have proven to be useful for gathering information about a crisis, these applications have provided only limited utilities for response coordination. One major problem of existing implemented VGI systems is heterogeneous data semantics. To provide more utilities to disaster response, a VGI system that can encode data semantics is needed. The objective of this research is to propose such a VGI system based on the state-of-the-art Geospatial Semantic Web technologies. A prototype for disaster response in Connecticut was implemented. Although there are still issues waiting for further studies, the implemented prototype shows great promise.