Building disaster-relief phone apps on the fly

— a Semantic Web search could retrieve only the pertinent sections of only those sites that contain information about restaurants within a mile of the precise geographic coordinates of New York’s Penn Station that are open past 10 p.m. and have vegetarian entrees.

Since the RDF standard was first released in 2004, its adoption has been slow but steady.

Companies like IBM and Sears, media outlets like the New York Times and the BBC, and public information sources like airport websites and the PubMed index of medical-journal articles all use RDF. But perhaps more importantly for the new disaster-response tool, so do many government agencies. Data on the U.S. government’s data.gov site — and at the corresponding sites in many other countries — as well as on the websites of agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Census Bureau, and the National Science Foundation, put data online using RDF.

Kagal, however, hopes that new tools like the disaster-response application she and her colleagues developed will accelerate the adoption of RDF. “We’re hoping that we’ll have a kind of cyclic effect,” she says. “As people use these apps more, they will automatically generate structured data. And as there’s more structured data out there, there will be people building more apps to consume them, which will in turn generate more structured data.”

“When you have a disaster, there are two issues,” says Jim Hendler, director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s. “One is, ‘How do you get the data you need and pull it together?’ And two is, ‘How do you put that in the hands of the person who needs it?’ And this project is one of the first to really approach both parts of the problem together.”

Hendler points out that the new tools do require an application developer to know something about SPARQL, a scripting language that’s used to query linked data. But, he adds, with the tools, “Someone who knows how to develop apps can much more quickly develop something and move it to a mobile platform. You may need some basic knowledge, but the tool’s going to make it possible to do it much faster and easier.” Moreover, Kagal says, DIG is currently working on user-friendly software that will enable people to compose SPARQL queries without knowing anything about the language’s syntax.

In the field of Semantic Web technologies, Hendler says, “The holy grail is pulling together apps like this very generally across all sorts of information sources. This is a good step in the right direction.”

— Read more in Lalana Kagal et al., “Democratizing Mobile App Development for Disaster Management” (paper presented at the Workshop on Semantic Cities, Beijing, china, 3-5 August 2013)

Reprinted with permission of MIT News