Ontology Design for Information Integration in Disaster Management

: One of the most pressing issues in improving disaster management is that of information integration. With many organizations involved in the disaster, crossing regional or even national borders, information exchange is crucial but cumbersome due to differing vocabularies and representations both at human language and IT level. Carefully designed ontologies can be instrumental in addressing this problem, by providing a reference model for humans, and with that the basis for information integration at IT level. We devise an ontology stack covering the description of damages (caused by the disaster), resources (available to organizations fighting the disaster), and their connection (e.g. which resources are relevant for which damage). To ensure sustainable modeling, we follow the guiding principles of the foundational ontology DOLCE. We identify the most relevant design choices, and we discuss their solution. The resulting ontologies form part of a prototype that integrates information ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: GI
• Authors: Grigori Babitski, Florian Probst, Jörg Hoffmann, Daniel Oberle
• Keywords: Disaster, GI 2009, Information, Information Integration, Theoretical Computer Science