GEOGRAPHICAL SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION FOR 
COLLABORATIVE EMERGENCY SERVICES 
M. H. Zheng 3 ’ *, X. Z. Feng b , Y. J. Song b , Z. Q. Huang c 
institute of Disaster Prevention & Relief, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China - zmh@mail.tongji.edu.cn 
b Department of Geographic Information Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China - xzf, songyj@nju.edu.cn 
institute of Remote Sensing & Geographical Information System, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China - 
hzhaoq@126.com 
Commission IV, WG IV/8 
KEY WORDS: Internet GIS, Semantics, Interoperability, Geographical Services, Integration 
ABSTRACT: 
Geographical semantic representation, which aims at enhancing geospatial data model and facilitating information sharing and 
exchange, has been a hot topic in the realm of geographic information science. The research summarized here is to advance a 
geographical semantic representation framework to support geo-collaboration, focusing on how to take full advantage of Ontology 
and Web Services technologies to overcome the flaws of current WebGIS in the distributed cooperative computing model and 
application model, and make it better to serve collaborative GIS applications, such as collaborative emergency services. We 
considered a simplified evacuation scenario of toxic gas dispersion, following the proposed solution, the orchestration of application 
services based on semantics was conducted and illuminated. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Geographical semantic representation, which aims at enhancing 
geospatial data model and facilitating information sharing and 
exchange, has been a hot topic in the realm of geographic 
information science for the last decade [Tryfona and Sharma, 
1996; Bishr, 1998; Smith and Mark, 1998; Fonseca, Egenhofer, 
Agouris, et al., 2002; Zheng, 2006]. 
With rapid development of internet and the prevalent electronic 
business pattern, B2B, collaborative GIS is emerging and 
gaining more and more attentions [Zheng, 2006]. Urban 
Emergency management is a typical collaborative GIS 
application. Many social departments would participate in 
immediately and behave as dynamic, multi-institutional virtual 
organizations (VOs) [Foster, Kesselman, Tuecke, 2002] to deal 
with emergency event collaboratively once disaster occurs. In 
such cooperative work environment, some spatial decision- 
support operations do need interactions between business 
partners, which are usually geographically distributed. The 
interactions can be defined as a strict work flow and shared by 
every participant, joining them together on solving more 
complicated problems. It is of great significance to access and 
integrate distributed geospatial data and services effectively 
from different information providers in accordance with 
workflow. 
Geographical information sharing and collaboration requires 
agreement on meaning or interpretation of data in the specific 
domain. Geographical semantics is about understanding of GIS 
contents, and capturing this understanding in formal theories 
[kuhn, 2005]. It is reasonable to suppose that embedding 
explicit semantics on general geospatial data representation will 
help to improve common understanding and facilitate 
incorporating geospatial information services (GIServices) with 
E-Business flow seamlessly. As an explicit formal specification 
of a shared conceptualization [Gruber, 1993], ontology is adept 
in semantic expression and plays a key role in semantic-based 
information sharing and integration. Indeed there is currently a 
significant amount of effort being expended in the development 
of geographic ontologies and semantics in GIS community 
[Bishr, 1998; Kuhn, 2001, 2003, 2005; Mennis, 2003; Soon and 
Kuhn, 2004; Tryfona and Pfoser, 2005; Zheng, Feng, Jiang, et 
al., 2006]. In parallel, the potential for GIS to be the 
collaborative application environment among distributed 
agencies has also been widely discussed [Cai, 2005; 
MacEachren, Cai, Sharma, et al., 2005; Hopfer and 
MacEachren, 2007]. 
Our concern is with geographical semantic formalization and 
sharing in distributed, collaborative application environment. 
Towards the goal of improving geo-information collaboration 
and interoperability in urban emergency management, this 
paper is intended to present an integrated solution to enable 
geographical semantic representation with ontologies and 
facilitate GIServices integration and collaboration through 
semantic sharing. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: 
the next section describes methodology of the research. 
Geographic Ontology, Web Services, and the application in our 
work are discussed. Section 3 presents a general geographical 
semantic representation framework based on service oriented 
architecture (SOA) to support distributed collaborative GIS 
application. Some implementation issues of semantic 
representation are discussed. In section 4, a simplified 
evacuation scenario of toxic gas dispersion is introduced and 
the orchestration of application services based on formal 
semantics is conducted and illuminated. Section 5 comes to a 
conclusion with an outline of future work. 
Corresponding author: zmh@mail.tongji.edu.cn, phone 86-21-65983449;