Dynamic data sharing for facilitating communication during emergency responses

This paper describes the CHAIn system, which is designed to facilitate data sharing between disparate organisations during emergency response situations by resolving mismatches in their data. It uses structured data matching to reformulate failed queries in cases where these failed because of incompatibilities between the query (derived from the source schema) and the schema of the queried datasource (the target schema). This reformulation is done by developing matches between the source schema and the target schema. These matches are then used to reformulate the query and retrieve responses relevant to those expected by the original query. Despite the growing interest in intelligent query answering, integration of data matching into query answering is novel, and allows users to successfully query datasources even if they do not know how the data in that source is organized, which is often the case during emergency responses. We describe the proof-of-concept system we have developed and an encouraging initial evaluation.