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6.2 FGDC HSWG Emergency Management Symbology
The US Federal Geographic Data Committee Homeland Security Working Group FGDC HSWG symbology set, standardized by the American National Standards Institute
ANSI, divides symbols into four categories:
Incidents: cause of action or source of disaster; Natural events: phenomenon created by naturally occurring conditions;
Infrastructure: basic facilities, services and installations needed for the
functioning of a community; and
Operations: capabilities or resources available during or implemented due to an
emergency. Borders and patterns around these shapes are used to visually classify the symbols into
their respective groups. The FGDC HSWG Emergency Management Symbology is designed in black and white and uses TrueType fonts for the icons.
Figure 1: HSWG Emergency Symbology Samples
For this testbed, we encoded the natural events and incidents using Simple Knowledge Organization System SKOS encoding and then aligned the encoding of the symbols
with the Symbology Ontology produced during this testbed. We leverage some of the work performed during the OGC Testbed 10 OGC 14-049.
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6.3 Canadian Emergency Management Symbology
The Canadian Emergency Mapping Symbology EMS is designed to be used in both single and multi-agency emergency mapping applications to facilitate interoperability and
situational awareness. The user community consists of federal, provincial, regional and local organizations involved in the management of major events, disasters, and other
incidents where emergency help and security are needed. From a command and control perspective, which includes the military and many civilian organizations, such
occurrences are referred to as incidents. Some civilian agencies though have preferred the term event instead. As used by EMS, the terms incident and event are interchangeable. In
addition to incidents, an understanding of the overall picture describing an emergency requires knowledge of infrastructures and operations. These terms are widely accepted,
and consequently are used in EMS as well.
A symbology includes a set of symbol definition. As important, symbology also includes a classification of the entities under consideration. A four level, hierarchical taxonomy is
used here. At the highest level, all entities fall in the EMS domain. Incident, infrastructure and operation are considered as categories within that domain, as are
aggregate and other. Other domains may exist with other categories. Each category is subdivided further to form a set of Tier 1 classes; each of these in turn is broken down
further to create Tier 2 classes. A diagram showing the structure of the classification is shown in Figure 2: EMS Classification Structure
Figure 2: EMS Classification Structure
The classification can also be represented in text by a simple dot notation:
Tier 1 entity: domain.category.tier1 Tier 2 entity: domain.category.tier1.tier2
Kategori