Public Safety Information Sharing: An Ontological Perspective

In recent years there has been a thrust on public safety related information-sharing efforts. However, many public safety information systems are incapable of efficient data sharing due to their heterogeneous nature. Digital government research has focused on the use of ontologies as they might play a key role in achieving seamless connectivity between heterogeneous systems. In this chapter we conduct a survey of public safety information sharing initiatives and discuss the ontological implications of the systems and standards. We also include a comprehensive review on ontologies and ontology-based information sharing and integration approaches in the digital government and other domains. We discuss the importance of ontology mapping for the public safety domain and present a survey of the state-of-the-art in ontology mapping. To showcase ontology-based sharing efforts we present two case studies: the first on evaluating mapping tools with law enforcement data and the second on using ontologies for sharing and analysis of extremist data.