Integrating and publishing public safety data using semantic technologies

• Authors: Alvaro Graves
• Venue: Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference on Public Administration Online: Challenges and Opportunities
• Year: 2010

Information on public safety is important to organized society for a number of reasons: First, citizens can use such records to identify risks in their communities. This can influence their short-term decisions (whether to visit a certain place or not) or long-term decisions, (such as whether to buy a house in a particular neighborhood). Second, government officials can use records on public safety and emergencies to make community-impacting decisions (such as budget adjustments for police forces). Third, information on safety-related activities can improve the transparency of, for example, law-enforcement organizations, enhancing their community relationship. In this paper we describe the creation of a website describing public safety events in the city of Troy, New York. Here, users can obtain information from different sources, to either browse on our website or use for their own services. Additionally, we have developed an ontology for representing these public safety events in a flexible and extensible manner. We describe the process and techniques used for integrating this information, the functionality made available though these approaches and the possible extensions to our work.