Affiliations: [a] Tetherless World Constellation, Department of
Cognitive Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA. E-mail:
[email protected] | College of Staten Island, City University of New York,
NY, USA | Universidad Autónoma del Estado de
México, Mexico | Information Science Institute, University of Southern
California, California, USA
Abstract: Information about public safety has become critical for government
organizations, non-government organizations and citizens in general. It enables
informed decisions to be made by individuals, as well as guides the creation of
public policies. As with many domains, information on public safety is usually
spread across different organizations, described in different formats and
published at different levels of granularity and richness. In this paper, we
present work done on a web-based portal that aggregates and displays public
safety information for the city of Troy, New York. This portal shows how the
use of semantic technologies facilitates the integration of multiple data
sources with disparate characteristics. The portal demonstrates two types of
functionality: First, it shows different examples of integration of public
safety information through a variety of examples and visualizations. Second, it
acts as a source of semantified data that third-party developers can use in
their own applications.
