Collocated with The 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM2015)


Emergencies require massive coordinated efforts from various departments, government organizations and public bodies to help and assist affected communities. Responders must rapidly gather information, determine where to deploy resources and make prioritization decisions regarding how best to deal with an evolving situation. Sharing accurate, real time and contextual information between different agencies, organizations and individuals is therefore crucial to developing good situation awareness for emergency responders. However, with the involvement of multiple organizations and agencies, each with their own response protocols, knowledge practices and knowledge representations, sharing critical information is considerably more difficult. Applying semantic technologies to represent information can provide excellent means for effectively sharing and using data within different organizations. Using highly structured, self-descriptive pieces of information, interlinked with multiple data resources can help develop a unified and accurate understanding of an evolving scenario. This provides an excellent framework for developing applications and technologies that are highly generic, reproducible and extendible to different regions, conditions, and scenarios. In addition, the semantic descriptions of data can enable new forms of analyses on this data, such as checking for inconsistencies, verifying developments according to planned scenarios, or trying to discover interesting semantically meaningful patterns in data. Such analytics can be performed either in real-time as the scenario unfolds, e.g., through semantic stream processing and event detection techniques, or as an after-action analysis to learn from past events.

SAFE2015 targets the intersection between Semantic Web and Linked Data, and the field of information systems for Emergency Response. The focus is on the use of semantic technologies to gather, share and integrate knowledge, as well as for supporting novel methods for analyzing such information, in order to provide better situation awareness, decision support, and potential for after-action reviews. This full-day workshop will be highly interactive, including presentations, demos, poster discussions, group work sessions, and road-mapping activities. We invite submissions in the form of research papers, demonstrations and poster papers, related to the workshop topics listed below.

Workshop topics include, but are not limited to:

* Semantic Annotation and Mining, for understanding the content and context of both static sources and streaming data, such as social media streams.
* Integration of unstructured or semi-structured data with Linked Data.
* Interactive Interfaces and visual analytics methodologies for managing multiple large-scale, dynamic, evolving datasets, while exploiting their underlying semantics.
* Vocabularies, ontologies and ontology design patterns for modelling, managing, sharing and analysing information in the Security and Emergency Response domains.
* Stream reasoning and event detection over RDF streams.
* Collaborative tools and services for citizens, organisations, communities, which exploit semantic technologies, and/or produce semantically well-specified information, such as Linked Data.
* Privacy, ethics, trustworthiness and legal issues in the social Semantic Web and the use of semantic technologies, such as Linked Data.
* Use case analysis, with specific interest for use cases that involve the application of semantic technologies and Linked Data methodologies in real-life scenarios.

Submissions

The workshop welcomes submissions describing novel research, both verified results as well as work in progress and system demonstrations.
Submission categories:
* Full research papers, up to 10 pages.
* Position papers, up to 5 pages.
* Demos & Posters, up to 4 pages.
Paper submissions will have to be formatted in the Springer LNCS style.
Submissions are made using EasyChair (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=safe2015).
Papers will be published as online proceedings, e.g. in CEUR-WS.

Workshop organizers

Eva Blomqvist, Linköping University, Sweden
Tomi Kauppinen, Aalto University, Finland
Vita Lanfranchi, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Carsten Kessler, Hunter College–CUNY, USA
Suvodeep Mazumdar, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom