Knowledge as a Service Framework for Collaborative Data Management in Cloud Environments - Disaster Domain

Decision-making in disaster management requires information gathering, sharing, and integration by means of collaboration on a global scale and across governments, industries, and communities. Large volume of heterogeneous data is available; however, current data management solutions offer few or no integration capabilities and limited potential for collaboration. Moreover, recent advances in NoSQL, cloud computing, and Big Data open the door for new solutions in disaster data management. This chapter presents a Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) framework for disaster cloud data management (Disaster-CDM), with the objectives of facilitating information gathering and sharing; storing large amounts of disaster-related data; and facilitating search and supporting interoperability and integration. In the Disaster-CDM approach NoSQL data stores provide storage reliability and scalability while service-oriented architecture achieves flexibility and extensibility. The contribution of Disaster-CDM is demonstrated by integration capabilities, on examples of full-text search and querying services.