The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B4. Beijing 2008 
specific communication protocol. However, when working 
through World Wide Web, i.e., Internet, a gateway must be 
needed to support the interactions between agent activities and 
standard web services such as OGC SWE compliant web 
services. A specific middleware can be developed to implement 
the gateway (Figure 6). 
Figure 6. Gateway Connecting Agent and Web Service 
5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE STUDIES 
Information Processing, 15-18 Dec. 2006, Piscataway, NJ, 
USA. 
Delin, K., 2006. The Sensor Web: Distributed Sensing for 
Collective Action, Sensors, 23(7), pp. 18-22. 
Delin, K. A., 2004. The Sensor Web: A Distributed, Wireless 
Monitoring System, Sensors (Peterborough, NH), 21(4), pp. 20- 
25. 
Delin, K. A., S. P. Jackson,D. W. Johnson, S. C. Burleigh, R. R. 
Woodrow,J. M. McAuley, J. M. Dohm,F. Ip, T. P. A. Ferre, D. 
F. Rucker and V. R. Baker, 2005. Environmental Studies with 
the Sensor Web: Principles and Practice, Sensors, 5(1-2), pp. 
103-117. 
Erharuyi, N. and D. Fairbaim, 2003. Mobile Geographic 
Information Handling Technologies to Support Disaster 
Management, Geography, 88(4), pp. 312-319. 
Ericsson, M., 2007. The Effects of Xml Compression on Soap 
Performance, World Wide Web-Internet and Web Information 
Systems, 10(3), pp. 279-307. 
web for 
conceptual 
of sensor 
nts (DRA) 
on of the 
sensor web 
The details 
igures 5. 
For effective and efficient disaster management and emergency 
response, sensing, monitoring and decision making cannot be 
taken apart separately. The proposed framework does help to 
reach this goal. It not only offers real time disaster sensing and 
monitoring, but also provides real time dynamic decision 
making based on the sensing data. More importantly, it supports 
tight integration of both. Thus, with the adoption of multi-agent 
system and rule-based expert system into the framework, a 
knowledge-oriented sensor web for disaster management 
becomes really reasonable, operationally desirable and 
technically feasible. In the future study, two technical 
challenges must be further explored: 1) How to utilize 
knowledge engineering to capture expertise and professional 
knowledge into disaster management knowledge based, 2) How 
to develop a middleware to implement the gateway, which 
supports the interactions between agents and web services. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 
The research was partially supported by Ontario Graduate 
Scholarship provided by Ministry of Training, Colleges and 
Universities, Ontario, and President’s Graduate Scholarship 
granted by University of Waterloo, Canada. OARS Graduate 
Research Award offered by Ontario Association of Remote 
Sensing is also acknowledged. 
Fiedrich, F. and P. Burghardt, 2007. Agent-Based Systems for 
Disaster Management, Communications of the ACM, 50(3), pp. 
41-42. 
Fiorucci, P., F. Gaetani, R. Minciardi and E. Trasforini, 2005. 
Natural Risk Assessment and Decision Planning for Disaster 
Mitigation, Advances in Geosciences, 2, pp. 161-165. 
Gibbons, P. B., B. Karp,Y. Ke, S. Nath and S. Srinivasan, 2003. 
Irisnet: An Architecture for a Worldwide Sensor Web, 
Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 2(4), pp. 22-33. 
Kwan, M.-P. and J. Lee, 2005. Emergency Response after 9/11: 
The Potential of Real-Time 3d GIS for Quick Emergency 
Response in Micro-Spatial Environments, Computers, 
Environment and Urban Systems, 29(2), pp. 93-113. 
Liang, S. H. L., A. Croitoru and C. V. Tao, 2005. A Distributed 
Geospatial Infrastructure for Sensor Web, Computers & 
Geosciences, 31(2), pp. 221-231. 
McCarthy, J. D., P. A. Graniero and S. M. Rozic, 2008. An 
Integrated GIS-Expert System Framework for Live Hazard 
Monitoring and Detection, Sensors, 23(8), pp. 28-36 
McQuaid, J., 2006. Katrina's Assault on New Orleans, World 
Watch, 19(5), pp. 13-17. 
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