SoKNOS – Using Semantic Technologies in Disaster Management Software

Abstract

Abstract. Disaster management software deals with supporting staff in large catastrophic incidents such as earthquakes or floods, e.g., by providing relevant information, facilitating task and resource planning, and managing communication with all involved parties. In this paper, we introduce the SoKNOS support system, which is a functional prototype for such software using semantic technologies for various purposes. Ontologies are used for creating a mutual understanding between developers and end users from different organizations. Information sources and services are annotated with ontologies for improving the provision of the right information at the right time, for connecting existing systems and databases to the SoKNOS system, and for providing an ontology-based visualization. Furthermore, the users' actions are constantly supervised, and errors are avoided by employing ontology-based consistency checking. We show how the pervasive and holistic use of semantic technologies leads to a significant improvement of both the development and the usability of disaster management software, and present some key lessons learned from employing semantic technologies in a large-scale software project.

Crowdsourcing Tools for Disaster Management: A Review of Platforms and Methods

“…A review of situational awareness ontologies is provided in [48], and proposals to formalize the basic components of situation awareness in an ontology can also be found in [49,50]. Further ontological approaches to disaster management can be found in [51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62]. Liu, Brewster and Shaw [63] offer a comprehensive review of 26 ontologies.…”

Research of Scenario Inference of Emergency Based on OWL and SWRL

“…Aiming at the problem above, more and more researchers had tended to employ the semantic technology to obtain the solution [3][4][5]. Recently, some semantic technologies had been applied to express knowledge in emergencies [6][7][8], integrate data from different sources [4], and model the formal plan for emergency management [9], but there are few researches on taking the advantage of the reasoning power of semantic web to infer the scenario evolution in emergencies.…”

“…Recently, some semantic technologies had been applied to express knowledge in emergencies [6][7][8], integrate data from different sources [4], and model the formal plan for emergency management [9], but there are few researches on taking the advantage of the reasoning power of semantic web to infer the scenario evolution in emergencies. Although Li et al had used SWRL [10] to analyze the emergency evolution, and the event chain model proposed by them cannot effectively describe the intricate relationships between scenarios in emergencies [11].…”

OntoFire: an ontology-based geo-portal for wildfires

“…The use of ontologies and the Semantic Web (Berners- Lee et al, 2001) is seen as a part of the solution to overcome limitations of the current search mechanisms. In the area of natural disasters, ontology-based solutions have been proposed to provide seamless integration of heterogeneous data agencies (Silva and Madurapperuma, 2007;Murgante et al, 2009) and efficient information retrieval (Babitski et al, 2011). There has not been much work, however, on the improvement of the information retrieval mechanisms from a user's perspective.…”

“…However, information retrieval is still based on keywords, and ontology visualization is only used as assistant tool for the query formulation. In Babitski et al (2011), ontology-based visualization is accomplished through a Semantic Data Explorer (Paulheim and Meyer, 2011). Nevertheless, the proposed system is not a geo-portal environment but rather an integrated emergency management system for connecting existing systems and databases.…”