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Copyright © 2015 Open Geospatial Consortium.
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
Copyright © 2015 Open Geospatial Consortium.
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Figure 3: Canadian EMS Symbols and taxonomy
For this project, we manually encoded the EMS Incident taxonomy using SKOS encoding. We then performed a manual mapping from the EMS concepts to HSWG
concepts using SKOS mapping properties skos:exactMatch, skos:closeMatch, skos:broaderMatch,….
Here a sample of the mapping prefix : http:www.opengis.nettaxonomyems-hswg_mapping .
prefix ems: http:www.opengis.nettaxonomyems . prefix incidents: http:www.fgdc.govHSWGtaxonomyincidents .
prefix natural-events: http:www.fgdc.govHSWGtaxonomynatural-events . prefix owl: http:www.w3.org200207owl .
prefix rdf: http:www.w3.org19990222-rdf-syntax-ns . prefix rdfs: http:www.w3.org200001rdf-schema .
prefix skos: http:www.w3.org200402skoscore . prefix spin: http:spinrdf.orgspin .
prefix xsd: http:www.w3.org2001XMLSchema . http:www.opengis.nettaxonomyemsems.incident
skos:exactMatch incidents:Incident ;