Fire alerts on the geospatial semantic web

Abstract

AFIS (Advanced Fire Information System) is a joint initiative between CSIR and Eskom, the South African electricity utility. AFIS infers fire occurrences from processed remotely sensed data and triggers alarms to Eskom operators based on proximity of fire events to Eskom infrastructure. Authors intend migrating AFIS from a narrowly focussed, ‘blackbox’ application to one servicing users in multiple firerelated scenarios, enabling rapid development and deployment of new applications through conceptbased queries of data and knowledge repositories. Future AFIS versions would supply highly tuned, meaningful and customised fire alerts to users based on an open framework of geospatial Web services, ontologies and software agents. Other Webbased geospatial applications may have to follow a similar path, via Web services and standardsoriented architectures, towards providing geoinformation to the semantic web.