Taming the flood

Confronting disasters or crises, be it natural or human-caused, require adequate access to information and a high degree of cooperation between involved organizations, authorities and citizens. This paper addresses the problem of information integration and manageability by proposing an approach resilient to high data influx and partial system failures which uses semantic technologies to make sense of the information flood emerged during the crises, allows citizens to provide real-time information about ongoing incidents, and finally warns people of acute dangers in their vicinity. This approach integrates people in the information feedback loop and allows authorities to manage the situation more efficiently and effectively.