Interoperability as a Property: Enabling an Agile Disaster Management Approach

Abstract

Catastrophic events triggered or augmented by regional conflicts, climate change and new disease strains appear to be increasing in intensity and frequency. Preparation, response and recovery are essential to survive the new wave of large-scale disasters; unfortunately however, the heterogeneous set of institutions and organisations responsible for delivering emergency response services often fail to rise up to the task, with the lack of proper collaboration featuring as a main culprit. Previous research and applications have advocated for and presented a holistic and integrated approach to improve interoperability seen as an essential component of collaboration. In this position paper, we aim to contribute to advancing that research by providing a novel perspective to interoperability issues, that takes into account the advent of Internet technology feeding the emergence of the 'Internet of Things' (IoT), enabling the different artefacts to sense, process, share and act in an ubiquitous, Internet-like environment. Thus, we investigate the potential application of a novel IoT-aware 'interoperability as a property' (IaaP) paradigm in order to provide a sound state-of-the-art platform for efficient preparation by disaster management organisations and agile, adaptive response delivered by synergic task force and rescue teams.