HUODINI – Flexible Information Integration for Disaster Management

Fast and effective disaster management requires access to a multitude of heterogeneous, distributed, and quickly changing data sets, such as maps, satellite images, or governmental databases. In the last years, also the information created by affected persons on web sites such as flickr.com or blogger.com became an important and very quickly adapting source of information. We developed HUODINI, a prototype system for the flexible integration and visu-alization of heterogeneous data sources for disaster management. HUODINI is based on Semantic Web technolo-gies, and in particular RDF, to offer maximal flexibility in the types of data sources it can integrate. It supports a hybrid push/pull approach to cater for the requirements of fast-changing sources, such as news feeds, and maximum performance for querying the integrated data set. In this paper, we describe the design goals underlying our ap-proach, its architecture, and report on first experiences with the system. 1.1 Keywords Data management, information integration, semantic integration, disaster managemen