Cloud-based Semantic Services for Pan-EuropeanEmergency Preparation and Planning

Christina Schafer, Torben Sauerland,Jens Pottebaum, Robin Marterer

C.I.K.Faculty of Mechanical Engineering

Paderborn University, GermanyEmail: {schaefer, sauerland, pottebaum, marterer}@cik.upb.de

Daniel Behnke, Christian WietfeldCommunication Networks Institute (CNI)

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information TechnologyTU Dortmund University, Germany

Email: {daniel.behnke, christian.wietfeld}@tu-dortmund.de

Peter Gray, Bogdan DespotovCloudSigma

Email: {peter.gray, bogdan.despotov}@cloudsigma.com

Abstract—Todays emergency management especially in cross-border incidents is still underlying communication and interoper-ability barriers. By the introduction of a Common InformationSpace (CIS) as a socio-technical system, concepts for bridgingbetween involved first responder and Police Authorities becomesevident. Within this paper technical elements of the concepts aredescribed to also demonstrate the practical realization of a CIS.

I. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION

If a training exercise planner gets the task to develop newways for training or significant scenarios to be prepared for,i.e. against larger CBRN incidents, an odyssey of search andgrapping pieces of information begins. The planner starts tosearch similar incidents but also involved organisations inthese events, even in other countries. To support this worka trusted system to ensure adaquate information exchangebetween first responder is needed.

SecInCoRe envisionsSituation at the FDDO

Head of FD Exercise planner

Plan an exercise like thethe one of 2011! Okay!

Situation at a Fire department (FD)

Fig. 1. Basic Scenario

a Common InformationSpace (CIS) as asocio-technical system,co-designed and co-developed between enduser, researcher anddesigner, to support firstresponders and Police

Authorities in emergency management. The overall conceptof a common information space was introduced by Bannonin the early 9os: ”Cooperative work is not facilitated simplyby the provision of a shared database, but requires the activeconstruction by the participants of a common informationspace where the meanings of the shared objects are debatedand resolved, at least locally and temporarily.” [1]. Even inthis definition the relevancy of CIS participants’ involvementand a required common understanding about terminologyand procedures become obvious. To overcome this situation,several technical components and socio-based concepts ofa CIS have to fit together. This task has been addressed

by the SecInCoRe project. The development of a modularCIS concept, adaptable to the needs of the respective enduser groups and proofed with the development of referenceimplementations are in line with the project objectives (seewww.secincore.eu). The different concepts and respectivereference implementations will be introduced within the paperusing the task for an exercise planner as reference scenario.

II. CURRENT STATE OF TECHNOLOGY: LACK OFCOMMUNICATION AND INTEROPERABILITY

Lack of communication and / or interoperability within andbetween different organizations is a crucial problem for firstresponder and Police Authorities. Even in the same countryinformation are often not shared consequently. In cross borderincidents the lack of information exchange becomes even moreevident.

Paderborn2016/10/25 1

Motivation (Chances)

Politics Industry Research

Artefacts of interest Processes Data sets Information Systems Business Models ELSI

COUNTRY A

COUNTRY B

First responder

Police authority

1

Pan-European Inventory

Fig. 2. Lack of Information Sharing

Fig. 2 depicts the demand and availability of information.To identify the state of the art and missing parts of informa-tion sharing practices, the SecInCoRe project conducted aninventory of past disaster, processes used in emergency man-agement and also available information and communicationsystems. This leads to comprehensive overview about available

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technologies in that domain. Results are public accessible viasecincore.eu/search. Another point of interest is to identifyused standards to exchange information in response but also inpreparation. In the preparation phase data is less standardizedand in many cases the exchange is related to personal contacts.These circumstances enforces the need-ability of SecInCoReto rely on the vision of a socio-technical system and elaboratethe CIS.

III. SOCIO-TECHNICAL CIS CONCEPT DESIGN ANDVISUALIZATIONS

The essence of SecInCoRe is the development and docu-mentation of a socio-technical concept design. In [2] the CISconcept, as depicted in Fig. 3, was introduced and the maincomponents of the CIS concept were outlined. The intentionof the concept design is to enable interaction and cooperationfor the emergency services.

In Reference Implementations the CIS Specification is con-verted into a living system which is used for demonstrationand evaluation purposes.

Common Information Space (CIS) concept documentation

Common Information Space

(CIS) concept

Terminology

Stakeholders

Collaborationpractices (incl. ‚ELSI

guidelines‘)

Taxonomy

ConOps for Cloud Emergency

Information System (CEIS)

Cloud Emergency Information System

(CEIS)

HLRD

Modular System Architecture

Network Enabled Communication

(NEC) systemconcept

SemanticFramework (SF)

Knowledge Base (KB)

Reference Implementations

Open SemanticFramework (OSF)

OpenAtrium (OA)

Semantic Media Wiki (SMW)

Communication network

components

Appendix: Demonstrator

Implementations

CIK_ AppFramework

Browser UI

Client application

Appendix: Demonstration

Cases

Lancashire Emergency Planning

case

Refugee crisis case

CIS Specification Reference Implementation

Demonstrations / Pilot Studies

Fig. 3. CIS concept - Red components are in focus of this work

The complexity of the CIS Specification as a documentationfor a socio-technical system constitutes the need to adapt theconcept visualizations to address different stakeholder groups.In order to implement the concept on a pan-European leveldecision makers regarding politics, technology and end usershave to be identified. To start with the grassroots, a visualiza-tion was derived based on the original CIS concept that addressthe benefits of using a CIS and the potential for upcomingcollaboration between existing and new partnerships. Thisvisualization is shown in Fig. 4. Here technical aspects aregrouped to a modular system architecture and further socialelements are combined to define a framework to enable atrusted and useful CIS. Based on this flexible assembled CISin relation to elements integrated in the system architecture ordefined in rules or guidelines of the CIS, the overall benefitsbecome visible.

Rules/Guidelines

Flexible assembled

CIS

Benefits of CIS

Access to (non)-public documents/reports and lessons

learned

Improved search to easy find and sense-making of relevant

information

Find relevant themes and provide awareness about domain specific

but diverse terminology

Improve/facilitate collaboration including new partnerships

Secure and trusted communication

Collaboration

Governance

HLRD

Modular System Architecture

Collaborative Platform

Semantic Services

NEC

Serve stakeholder to more efficient

and secure collaboration

Fig. 4. Benefit oriented Visualisation

In a next step relevant themes are addressed in a visualiza-tion to highlight various parts of a CIS. Fig. 5 depicts the five-pillar model of the CIS, the pillars address different aspectsof the concept and therefore different stakeholders as well.

CIS Specification

CIS ConceptDocumentation

NEC

RescueRoam

Seamless Access

HLRD

Security

Collaboration

Stakeholders

Terminology

Collaborative Platform

ELSI Guidelines

Semantic Services

SemanticFramework

Knowledge Base

Ontology

Inventory

Governance

Sustainability

Standardisation

CEIS Host/Owner

ConOps for CEIS

Mission Critical Services

CollaborationPractices

Taxonomy

Information

Collaboration

Usability

Access

Semantics

Fig. 5. Theme-based CIS Visualization

All pillars are described and explained in detail in the CISConcept Documentation. In Tab. I the pillars are connected tostakeholders and interest groups which have been identified.The intention is to present more details of the relevant pillar(s).The mentioned Reference Implementations explained in thefollowing sections help to demonstrate the functionalities ofthe system and hence, provide a better understanding of theconcept in general.

The following Table link interest groups with the identifiedpillars before and hence give a first hint how the adaption tospecific requirements happen. But the assignment is not limitedto the stakeholders. By focusing on dedicated end user needsthe demonstrator implementations can be realized to matchthese needs during the evaluation of the concept.

To visualize the foreseen reference implementations in detailthe system architecture is presented in Fig. 6.

The Figure gives a compact overview about the technicalconnections within SecInCoRe. The end user uses the NECto access the collaboration platform, where the SemanticFramework enables an integrated access to the contents of theKnowledge Base.

The first step to access the SecInCoRe system is to use

NEC

Local LDAP

ResueRoamServer

Federation ofLDAPs

RescueRoamAP

Collaboration Knowledge Base

Ontologies

Mission Critical Services

SemanticFramework

Open Atrium

Data exchange

Forum

SemanticSearch

Open Semantic

Framework

Man

ifo

ldC

F

VOWL

SOA

P In

terf

ace

SecInCoReOntologies

ExternalOntologies

InternalDatabases

ExternalDatabases

Filesystems

NetworkCoding

multilink

checkauthentication

checkremotelog-in

checkrole/user rights

Modular System Architecture

contains

contains

Enablesaccess to

Used tostructure

Arecrawled

Sends data

Sends data

Used tovisualizeontologies

Enables connectionof data + semantics

Fig. 6. System Architecture

TABLE ISTAKEHOLDER IDENTIFICATION

Pillar StakeholdersRescueRoam Engineers, e.g. JRCHigh Level Requirements Documentation Engineers, ManagementCollaboration Practices End-users, ManagementSemantic Services Engineers, End-usersGovernance Decision-makers, e.g. ERCC

the RescueRoam access point, to connect with the MissionCritical Services and using the multilink and network codingthe RescueRoam server. After the credentials are checked withLDAP servers, the collaboration platform can be accessed.Open Atrium contains functions as a forum, data exchangecapabilities and the connection to the Semantic Search. TheSemantic Search combines data and structuring approachesfrom different sources mainly from the Knowledge Base: Dif-ferent databases and filesystems are crawled with ManifoldCFto collect all data which should be searchable. To structurethe data, SecInCoRe and external ontologies are integrated.The Open Semantic Framework integrate the data and theontologies and provides the backend for the Semantic Search.After that the VOWL component is used within the SemanticSearch, to demonstrate the connection of the ontologies andthe data, enabling a Graph View.

All elements of the architecture are described in more detailin the following section.

IV. REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATIONS TO PROVIDESEMANTIC SERVICES

A. Knowledge Base

The Knowledge Base is constituted as a living systemincluding a data layer and a semantic layer. Several internaland external data bases are consolidated. Together with otherkinds of data sources these mentioned databases build the datalayer of the knowledge base. The results of the state of theart analysis (Inventory of data sets, processes and informationsystem) are an significant part of the Knowledge Base.

Fig. 7Search – Scenario, contact

Exercise planner

What is a good scenario? Who could join the exercise?

Search – Scenario & contact

• Sarin incident• Tokyo• …

THW CBRNE unit

Fig. 7. Grass-root of information

references tothe referencescenariodemon-strating theneeds of firstrespondersfor different

data sources and data types. Existing plans, related incidentsbut moreover, contacts to other first responders or Policeauthorities are required. Trust in information is directlylinked to trust in the person who provides this information.The SecInCoRe project gathers data in accordance toused or available information and communication systems,information management processes and business models. Thisinventory was used to identify structures and hence definedatabase models to store the data in the Knowledge Base.

ManifoldCF

RepositoryConnector

Tika Transformation Connector

OSF Output Connector

ManifoldCF

RepositoryConnector

Tika Transformation Connector

OSF Output Connector

Crawl Data Transformation to plain text Write data as xml-rdfData Sources

Open Semantic Framework

Core OSF Webservices

Open Semantic Framework

Core OSF Webservices

Triplestore

Search index

Tag Data (scones)

SOAP Server

OSF-PHP-API

SOAP Server

OSF-PHP-API

Process data

Search GUISearch GUI

Search

Tag Data (LOD)

Fig. 8. Data Crawling

The semantic layer describes relationships and crosslinksbetween the inventory data using an ontology (based on theSecInCoRe taxonomy). The SecInCoRe ontology was also cre-ated by reusing existing vocabularies, glossaries and semanticapproaches.

Fig. 8 shows the process of crawling data from differentdata sources and the data provisioning to be used in thesemantic framework. This demonstrates the cross-link betweenthe Knowledge Base and the semantic framework, describedlater on in this work. In the crawler ManifoldCF, a newrepository connector is created for the respective database e.g.of representative disaster events as required by the exerciseplanner. This connector crawls the database in defined times-lots. The data is not processed by the Tika plain text extraction,as the database is already in a readable format. The data is sentto the Open Semantic Framework Output Connector, whichwrites the data in a xml-rdf format and sends them to a SOAPServer. There the data could be translated, if needed. In thefollowing, the data is tagged with concepts, which are found inthe SecInCoRe ontologies. When the data is processed, everyrow of the database is stored in Open Semantic Frameworke.g. as a record of the dataset representative disaster events.The storage is done in a triplestore and in the search index.Therefore, the data is accessible in a semantic readable formatas well as searchable through a keyword search. Furtherfunctions connected to the semantic framework are describedin the section below.

B. Network-Enabled Communication

The Network-Enabled Communication system provides se-cure and resilient access to the Knowledge Base and theunderlying services and hence, is an enabler for the usageof semantic services and community interaction. One coreconcept of the NEC is the establishment of a RescueRoamaccess network for all European emergency services.

Maintaining on the already mentioned example of theplanner of a training exercise, the need to collaborate with

various emergency services and therefore a requirement forgetting internet access on foreign fire stations become evident(cf. Fig. 9).

TheWiFi access at FDDO

Exercise planner

THW

BBK

FD

How to get Internet? How to authenticate?

Use the RescueRoam

WiFi access at FD

Fig. 9. UseCase for RescueRoam

RescueRoamconceptdescribesa federatedcommu-nicationsystem whichenables the

usage of the SecInCoRe Knowledge Base from differentlocations. More concrete it is the aim to provide networkcapability using the same user credentials (WiFi-Access +SecInCoRe Knowledge Base Access - Single-Sign-On) atFire Station A, Fire Station B, etc. It adapts the eduroamconcept [3] to the special needs of emergency services.

MultilinkEndpoint

Satellite

LTE

MultilinkEndpoint

Inventory

LDAPRADIUS Server

User Authentication

RADIUSAccess Point

Fig. 10. Network Enabled Communication concept

Fig. 10 depicts the NEC system architecture. The Inven-tory and the LDAP Radius server as accounting componentrepresent the cloud-based CEIS. On the other side, a Radius-based WiFi access point connects the users to the CEIS. Theconnection will be managed by a multilink component.

The RescueRoam concept describes principles how to setupsuch a system and what requirements have to be fulfilled.

In order to demonstrate the benefits of such approach theRescueRoam reference implementation (R3I) is setup. TheR3I consists of one or many LDAP directories which providesthe user account management, a RADIUS server which isused to identify the Wi-Fi Access Points and the access pointsthemselves. Combining these components users can login tothe Wi-Fi network and access the Knowledge Base.

Fig. 11. NEC demonstration during 2nd Review Meeting

Seamless communication is strongly connected to a dy-namic and reliable network and communication link manage-ment combined with intelligent failover mechanisms and net-work monitoring tools. The secure access and resilient accessis realized using methodologies like Network Coding [4] andMultipath TCP (MPTCP) to enable the use of different radiocommunication technologies, e.g. WiFi and LTE.

MPTCP [5] is an extension of TCP, using multiple TCPflows for transmission. One master flow is divided in severalsub flows that are handled dynamically and are using variouswireless interfaces. Currently, some network parts could blocksignaling traffic, because of missing MPTCP features.

Fig. 11 shows the setup of Multipath TCP and RescueRoamon the first day of the 2nd review meeting. An embedded PCwas connected to the Internet via two mobile LTE modems.The RescueRoam access point was connected to that Internetgateway providing the WiFi for the participants of the meeting.On the embedded PC MPTCP was running in order to improvethe stability and reliability of the Internet connection. Theeffect was demonstrated using a shielding box to shield onemodem. Connection was ongoing on the other modem.

Besides MPTCP, the transmission principle of NetworkCoding is used. When a document is requested from theKnowledge Base, the data is splitted into different data packetsfilling an encoder buffer. When this buffer is full, NetworkCoding takes place. The content of packets in the bufferis analyzed at the same time, encoding it by mathematicalalgorithms. Afterwards the packets are transferred using the

multiple available communication links. In order to increasethe reliability of the transmission despite possible channelnoise, which leads to packet errors, the Network Coding iscreating additional packets.

On the receiving node, a decoding buffer is filled withincoming data packets. For a generation size of 16 packets,at least 16 packets have to be received for this generation.Afterwards, the decoding process is started and the gainedinformation is forwarded to the application layer. Each suc-cessful decoded generation is acknowledged to the sender byan message containing the generation ID.

Fig. 12. Network Coding reference implementation

A Network Coding reference implementation was demon-strated during the 3rd Advisory Board Meeting of SecInCoRe(cf. Fig.12). The setup contains a Laptop representing thecloud-based inventory and an embedded PC in rugged boxrepresenting an Internet gateway box. These two componentswere connected using two wired Ethernet connections viaa network switch. With a Qt-based graphical interface theexperiment setup was parameterized. The available parametersare the packet error rate for both links, the size of sent data andthe number of reliability packets for Network Coding usingsmooth parameterization between a reliable and a fast setup.For the Network Coding the kodo [6] library was used.

C. Semantic FrameworkThe Semantic Framework is an approach to cope with four

main problems with information exchange in the emergencydomain. The information within the domain is:

• Distributed - The information about domain specifictopics is stored in most cases at the level of differentemergency organizations within the EU. Mostly on amunicipal or county level. Therefore, there are thousandsof data sources out there.

• Unstructured - The information is stored in an unstruc-tured way. There are different file types with plans,lessons learned, reports etc. with no comparable layoutto save all this information.

File.pdf…

Emergency domain

AAO.xlsDer Alarm wird nur dann

File2.pdf…

Plan.txtW naszejorganicacii…

Represented in

SecInCoReDomain ontology

Knowledge Base

Upload in

Upload in

World knowledge

Upload in SecInCoRe databases

Databases

Upload in

Connect to

GER PL

Search in dataUsing ontologiesSearch

Fig. 13. Semantic Services

• Multi-lingual - Many people within the emergency do-main are speaking English, but the working language isin nearly all organizations the national language. Work-ing documents or results are not saved in English andtherefore not readable by foreigners.

• Restricted - Information has different levels of sensitivity.Organizations care at different levels about the securityof different parts of their data. A common phenomenon isinformation, which is not really restricted, but should notbe public for everyone as well. It is more like sensitivedata, which should mainly remain within the domain.

OverviewTo address these problems, the Semantic Framework (cf.

Fig. 13) is created as a set of organizational concepts andanalysis methods. The data in the domain is stored either indatabases or in file systems, spread among all organizationsThe data is inserted into the Knowledge Base either connectingthe databases directly or uploading the contents of the filesystems In addition to these data sources, the SecInCoRedatabases are connected to the Knowledge Base. WithinSecInCoRe different ontologies and semantic approaches weredeveloped, representing broad parts of the emergency domain.These ontologies as well as semantic approaches representingthe world knowledge are used to structure the data within theKnowledge Base. Finally, members of the domain could searchwithin the Knowledge Base using the Semantic Search.

HostingThis process is organizational supported by establishing a

CIS within a group of organizations within an EU-nation.This CIS is established by one managing authority, which hasto be capable to manage such a system, is able to acceptthe responsibility to run it and is very trustworthy in theeyes of potential participant organizations Caused by theserequirements, the managing authority has to be on a nationallevel or lower and a governmental institution (e.g. the nationalhome office). Different national systems could be connected toa bigger i.e. European conglomerate managed by a Europeanbody, where the details of responsibility and data exchangeshould be negotiated among the different managing authorities

AnalysisAfter the CIS is established and the data is collected

in the Knowledge Base, several analysis steps are done, toenable foreigners to get at least an overview of the collecteddocuments. First the data is translated, if they are not inEnglish to enable the semantic analysis to work. After that thedatasets are analyzed, to generate a summary, find the maintopics of it and to categorize the datasets within the PPDRdomain taxonomy, explained above. Using these approaches,foreign people can get a short overview what a dataset isabout. Adding the information about the origin organizationand the author of the dataset, all members of the CIS can get incontact with the author. The Semantic Framework enables theexchange of information and the establishing of new contactswithin the emergency domain. One example for this analysisis shown in Fig. 14.

Technical implementationThe technical core of the Semantic Framework is the

Paderborn2016/10/25 1

Unstructured/ multi‐lingual data

This document is for CBRN hazards in case of construction of a chemical plant…

Description of the emergencyplan for CBRN cases in London. 

1. CBRN2. CBRN detection3. London4. Emergency plan

New_document.pdf

London Fire Brigade

Head@Lndnfirebrigade.com

Source

Author

Topics

Summary

Translation

Fig. 14. Semantic Framework Analysis

Open Semantic Framework (OSF) [7]. In this component,all Knowledge Base content is stored RDF-based to enablethe semantic search in them. After that, the content analysisusing the SecInCoRe ontology (described above) is doneby this component. The OSF consists of several separatecomponents (as the Virtuoso triple store as RDF storage, a SolrSearch Index etc.) which offers the functionalities on stronginteraction. The whole system consists of several componentswhich communicate through a common interface. The GUI isthe frontend component which allows to search for documentcontents and displays the results and the details of eachdocument (e.g. summary, topics etc.). Additionally, it providesthe ability to filter the search results based on the ontologywhich is used in the OSF system for indexing and searching. Inaddition, the GUI has a view for the upload of documents froma file system. The OSF system and the GUI are connected viathe OSF-PHP API that is an abstraction layer to the underlyingOSF-Webservices, which contains methods for the creation,update, deletion, read, and search of records. ManifoldCF isresponsible for crawling and processing the documents anddatabase entries and accesses the previous mentioned PHPAPI to store the processed documents in the Open SemanticFramework.

Fig. 15. ManifoldCF

V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

In this work we introduced an innovative concept for asocio-technical system providing cloud-based semantic ser-vices. We focused on the technical design principles and used

reference implementations to demonstrate the system’s bene-fits and evaluate the concept in strong cooperation with emer-gency services as the upcoming end-users of such a system.We developed a methodology using different visualizationsof the common information space concept to disseminate theresults of the project and to overcome the valley of death ofresearch projects.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The research leading to these results has received fund-ing from the European Union Seventh Framework Program(FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n°607832 (projectSecInCoRe). The text reflects the authors’ views. The Euro-pean Commission is not liable for any use that may be madeof the information contained therein. For further informationsee http://www.secincore.eu/.

REFERENCES

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[2] J. Pottebaum, C. Schafer, M. Kuhnert, D. Behnke, C. Wietfeld,M. Buscher, and K. Petersen, “Common information space for collabora-tive emergency management,” in 2016 IEEE Symposium on Technologiesfor Homeland Security (HST), May 2016, pp. 1–6.

[3] K. Wierenga, S. Winter, and T. Wolniewicz, “The eduroam architecturefor network roaming,” RFC 7593, http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7593,Tech. Rep., 2015.

[4] S. Katti, H. Rahul, W. Hu, D. Katabi, M. Medard, and J. Crowcroft, “Xorsin the air: Practical wireless network coding,” IEEE/ACM Transactionson Networking, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 497–510, June 2008.

[5] (2017, 02) Multipath tcp - linux kernel implementation. [Online].Available: https://www.multipath-tcp.org/

[6] (2017, 02) Kodo network coding library. [Online]. Available:http://steinwurf.com/products/kodo.html

[7] (2017, 02) Open semantic framework. [Online]. Available:http://opensemanticframework.org/