I can really feel for you having suffered through 2 hurricane seasons (2004 & 2005) in Florida myself.

I think this whole thing about Linked Data for me though is still a lack of wide spread discussions on applications. Based on your “flood” of emotions, if I may humor you just a little, you might find Art Bottterell’s blog of interest at incident.com. Check out the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP).

Since consulting for 4 years with a Security Management Consulting firm and working on early warning systems for a crisis management command center and enterprise resiliency management initiatives, I have been following the CAP initiative which has been adopted by the ITU as its recommended X.1303. Thus I have been toying with the idea of integrating the protocol with a early warning application program and sweeten it up with linked data to make those connections you are talking about.

A few good applications could provide the thrust, show the potential and generate the incentive to utilize the techniques. Early Warning (EW) beyond just predicting weather has the potential to lower a firms risk and maintain business continuity. Used inside the firm, take supply chain and logistics as one example, an executive gets a daily EW brief and the issue of a flood appears on the report but at relatively low criticality. Within 24 hours it escalates and management is informed of the situation immediately, they have been given the time and the actionable intelligence to work with their railroad carrier to reroute those shipments of auto parts going to Detroit to avoid delays.

Applications that take advantage of the connections through linked data should have wider implications that enhance productivity of the communities that use them. Thus, while I find the technical attributes of the Semantic Web keenly interesting, I also find myself thinking about ways to apply it to real world problems.

John Wubbel