Improving geospatial query performance of an interoperable geographic situation-awareness system (IGSAS) for disaster response

Disaster response operations require fast and coordinated actions based on the real-time disaster situation information. Although Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) or crowdsourced geospatial data applications have demonstrated to be valuable tools for gathering real-time disaster situation information, they only provide limited utility for disaster response coordination because of the lack of compatibility and interoperability. VGI based on Geospatial Semantic Web (GSW) technologies has the potential to overcome the incompatibility and heterogeneity problems. However, GSW-based VGI often has poor performance due to complex geometric computation. The objective of this research is to explore how to use optimization techniques to improve performance of an interoperable geographic situation-awareness system (IGSAS) based on GSW technologies for disaster response. We conducted experiments to evaluate various client-side optimization techniques for improving performance of an IGSAS prototype for flooding disaster response in New Haven, Connecticut. Our experimental results show that the developed prototype can greatly reduce the runtime costs of geospatial semantic queries through on-the-fly spatial indexing, tile-based rendering, efficient algorithms for spatial join, and caching, especially for those spatial-join geospatial queries that involve a large number of spatial features and heavy geometric computation.