The challenges to sharing knowledge during humanitarian events are well documented. Of these, the lack of effective and meaningful communication between all actors in an event is the root cause of many of the inefficiencies that hinder the ultimate goal of relieving suffering and rebuilding societies. This presentation outlines an approach for applying semantic knowledge management, ontological rules, and Linked Data approaches to address these issues. We introduce semLayer, a geospatially-enabled Semantic MediaWiki prototype application with mobile and wiki-based collection components, built using open source constituent technologies. We will discuss specifically the integration of PostGIS as a data store, and how this approach compares to open source triples stores/frameworks (e.g. Apache Jena) that perform geospatial operations using the GeoSPARQL specification. We will then move into considerations of integrating micro-, domain-, and upper-ontologies and vocabularies, and defining rules that govern relationships between data and entities, including geospatial attributes. We will close with a discussion of contributing to a disaster response use case with a Linked Data approach.
