Spatio-temporal knowledge representation for emergency management

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This proposal takes advantage of a valuable opportunity which has arisen at short notice: the availability of Professor Michael Worboys (University of Maine, USA) to be a visiting researcher at the School of Engineering, Computing, and Mathematics, University of Exeter in May - July 2010.The project brings together the expertise of Dr Antony Galton (Principal Investigator) in spatial and spatio-temporal knowledge representations and the expertise of Professor Worboys in the field of spatial information in order to address issues in knowledge representations associated with dynamic spatial phenomena, with application to the domain of emergency management and disaster response. An important feature of the project is the collaboration of Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham, and the Department of Geomatics, University of Melbourne, Australia, who will contribute expertise in the geoinformatics of disaster management complementary but closely related to this endeavour.In general terms there can be no doubt that effective emergency management, monitoring the nation's critical infrastructure and managing recovery in the case of a disaster, is extremely important for the national economy, public services, and for the health of citizens. Effective emergency management and disaster response can be significantly enhanced by the new sensor-based technologies that are coming on stream. However, sensor data from many heterogeneous sources, distributed in space and time, can only be effectively utilized if the foundations in informatics and knowledge representation are available to transform the data into information that is timely and meaningful to decision makers. It is towards this goal that the research in this proposed project makes a contribution.