On the support of a similarity-enabled relational database management system in civilian crisis situations

Abstract

Crowdsourcing solutions can be helpful to extract information from disaster-related data during crisis management. However, certain information can only be obtained through similarity operations. Some of them also depend on additional data stored in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). In this context, several works focus on crisis management supported by data. Nevertheless, none of them provide a methodology for employing a similarity-enabled RDBMS in disaster-relief tasks. To fill this gap, we introduce a methodology together with the Data-Centric Crisis Management (DCCM) architecture, which employs our methods over a similarity-enabled RDBMS. We evaluate our proposal through three tasks: classification of incoming data regarding current events, identifying relevant information to guide rescue teams; filtering of incoming data, enhancing the decision support by removing near-duplicate data; and similarity retrieval of historical data, supporting analytical comprehension of the crisis context. To make it possible, similarity-based operations were implemented within one popular, open-source RDBMS. Results using real data from Flickr show that our proposal is feasible for real-time applications. In addition to high performance, accurate results were obtained with a proper combination of techniques for each task. Hence, we expect our work to provide a framework for further developments on crisis management solutions.