DRAFT Mission Statement

W3C Emergency Information Community Group

The goal of this group is to facilitate real world usage of Semantic Web technologies for the exchange of emergency information. In order to achieve this goal, the group will address the following items:

• Engage with practitioners at different levels (large international organizations to small NGOs and governments) to ensure relevance.
• Provide an annotated overview of standard vocabularies (ontologies) useful for the field, and in case additional vocabularies (ontologies) corresponding to practitioner needs are required, create such vocabularies (ontologies).
• Come up with best practices for the use of semantic web technologies in the field.
• Organize face to face meetings, also outside the academic scope. (As hard as it is for academics to get to NON academic conferences, it is as hard for emergency responders to get to academic conferences.)
• Develop a group glossary of core terms for use within the group.