A SEMANTIC FRAMEWORK FOR ENHANCING INFORMATION INTEROPERABILITY IN EMERGENCY AND DISASTER MANAGEMENT
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A SEMANTIC FRAMEWORK FOR ENHANCING INFORMATION INTEROPERABILITY IN EMERGENCY AND DISASTER MANAGEMENT Shuangyan Liu1, Christopher Brewster1, Duncan Shaw2 1 Aston Business School, Aston University 2 Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick WITH THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF THE PREVENTION, PREPAREDNESS, AND CONSEQUENCE MANAGEMENT OF TERRORISM AND OTHER SECURITY-RELATED RISKS PROGRAMME. EUROPEAN COMMISSION - DIRECTORATE-GENERAL HOME AFFAIRS
2
Outline
• Semantic Interoperability Challenge for Disaster
Management
• What is an Ontology?
• Existing Ontologies for Disaster Management
• A Semantic Framework for Emergency and
Disaster Management
• Future Work3
A Flooding Scenario
Worcestershire
County Council Table Table Charity
Vulnerable_residents disadvantaged_groups
DB DB
How does a program to discover the common meanings for the databases it encounters?4 Semantic Interoperability Challenge for Disaster Management • Institute for Security Technology Studies (ISTS) Report • Syntax interoperability • Encode data in XML and transfer it via Internet protocols • XML – add structure to documents but tell nothing about what the structures mean • At fundamental level, different groups can have fundamentally different conceptualisations of disasters and disaster management and might use very different terminologies or vocabularies
5
What is an Ontology?
Tim Berners-Lee:
“ An ontology is a document or file that formally defines the relations among
terms.”
OWL – a formal ontology language, and it provides standard labels for
describing terms.
o Classes (owl:class, owl:unionOf etc.)
o Properties (owl:ObjectProperty, owl:DatatypeProperty, rdfs:domain, rdfs:range
etc.)
o Property restriction (owl:allValuesFrom, owl:cardinality etc.)
o Relations (owl:equivalentClass, rdfs:subClassOf, owl:equivalentProperty etc.)
o Characteristics of properties (e.g. owl:SymmetricProperty)
o Datatypes (e.g. rdfs:Literal)
o ... and more
A domain ontology provides a shared understanding of the domain.
Querying and reasoning using an ontology can help reveal implicit concepts
and relationships that may not readily apparent.6
Existing Ontologies for Disaster Management
• Motivation of Ontologies Review
• Ontologies Review focuses on
Liu et al. Ontologies for Crisis Management: A Review
Ontologies for Crisis Management: A Review of
State of the Art in Ontology Design and Usability
• Coverage of Ontologies Shuangyan Liu
Aston Business School, Aston University,
Christopher Brewster
Aston Business School, Aston University,
Birmingham, United Kingdom Birmingham, United Kingdom
S.Liu10@aston.ac.uk C.A.Brewster@aston.ac.uk
• Design of Ontologies Duncan Shaw
Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
Duncan.Shaw@wbs.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
• Use Cases of Ontologies The growing use of a variety of information systems in crisis management both by non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and emergency management agencies makes the challenges of information sharing and
interoperability increasingly important. The use of semantic web technologies is a growing area and is a
technology stack specifically suited to these challenges. This paper presents a review of ontologies, vocabularies
and taxonomies that are useful in crisis management systems. We identify the different subject areas relevant to
crisis management based on a review of the literature. The different ontologies and vocabularies available are
analysed in terms of their coverage, design and usability. We also consider the use cases for which they were
• Publication
designed and the degree to which they follow a variety of standards. While providing comprehensive ontologies
for the crisis domain is not feasible or desirable there is considerable scope to develop ontologies for the subject
areas not currently covered and for the purposes of interoperability.
Keywords
Ontologies, crisis management, information interoperability, ontology design and usability, semantic web.
INTRODUCTION
In crisis management, different domain vocabularies are used by different crisis information systems. This
presents a challenge to exchanging information efficiently since the semantics of the data can be heterogeneous
and not easily assimilated. For example, the word ‘Person’ can have different meanings - a ‘displaced person’,
‘recipient of aid’, or ‘victim’. Semantic interoperability is a key challenge to interoperability (Sheth, 1999). The
term “semantic interoperability” refers to the ability of computer systems to communicate data with a unified
meaning (Sheth, 1999). One way to tackle this problem is using ontologies to make accessible data that would
otherwise be inaccessible (Wache, Vögele, Visser, Stuckenschmidt, Schuster and Heumann, 2001). This is
because an ontology can provide a unified explanation of concepts and relationships used by the application
field, make them shareable by different users and allow them to be machine process-able.
A variety of application specific ontologies have been developed for crisis information management, which
enable interoperability in specific scenarios. The need to develop open standards that make it possible to address
the interoperability challenge in crisis management has been recognised as significant (Di Maio, 2008). A
prerequisite to meeting this challenge is to have an overview of the currently existing ontologies that have been
developed to address these requirements. Hence, the focus of this paper is a review of existing ontologies for
crisis management. Specifically, this paper identifies the subject areas covered by the concepts in these
ontologies, the types of crisis management systems they address, and how these ontologies were designed and
used.
This paper is structured as follows. In the Methodology section, we present the research questions that we are
considered in our review. We then describe the data collection and analysis methods used to extract relevant
information for our investigation. Next, we present the findings in the Results section, including the identified
subject areas involved in crisis management, the ontologies that cover these subject areas, a detailed reflection
on the design and usability of the ontologies and the standards that these ontologies conform to. Last, we
provide a summary of the findings and the potential impact of our research in the Conclusion section.
Proceedings of the 10th International ISCRAM Conference – Baden-Baden, Germany, May 2013
T. Comes, F. Fiedrich, S. Fortier, J. Geldermann and L. Yang, eds.
1Subject Areas in Disaster
7
Management
Ontologies Review Results8
Ontologies Review Results
Number of Ontologies Representation
Subject Area Ontology Name Downloadable Documentation
Identified Language
Minimal (academic
Resources 3 SOKNOS OWL-DL No
nature)
MOAC RDF Yes Online specification
Minimal (academic
SIADEX Not known No
nature)
Minimal (private wiki
Processes 2 ISyCri OWL-DL No
and in French)
WB-OS XML Available upon request Academic nature
People 2 FOAF RDF Yes Online specification
BIO RDF Yes Online specification
Organisations 3 ERO2M N/A No Academic nature
IntelLEO RDF Yes Online specification
Organisation Ontology RDF Yes Online specification9
Ontologies Review Results
Number of Ontologies Representation
Subject Area Ontology Name Downloadable Documentation
Identified Language
Damage 1 HXL RDF Yes Online specification
Classification of
Disasters 4 EM-DAT N/A Online query
disasters available
UNEP-DTIE N/A Online query Online documentation
Canadian Disaster Classification of
N/A Online query
Database disasters available
Australian Government
Attorney-General’s
N/A Online query Online documentation
Department Disasters
Database
Minimal (academic
Infrastructure 3 PSCAD N/A No
nature)
Minimal (academic
EPANET N/A No
nature)
OTN OWL Yes Specification available
Geography 1 GeoNames RDF Yes Online documentation10
Ontologies Review Results
Number of Ontologies Representation
Subject Area Ontology Name Downloadable Documentation
Identified Language
Ordnance Survey
Hydrology 1 OWL Yes Online documentation
Hydrology Ontology
NNEW weather
Meteorology 1 OWL Yes Online documentation
ontology
Topography 4 USGS CEGIS OWL Yes Not available
Ordnance Survey
Buildings and Places OWL Yes Online documentation
Ontology
E-response Building
OWL Yes Not available
Pathology Ontology
E-response Building
Internal Layout OWL Yes Not available
Ontology
AktiveSA (multi-
Other 1 OWL Yes Not available
domain)11
A Semantic Framework
for Emergency and Disaster Management
• To unify the identified conceptual areas
• To identify missing vocabularies in planning and
coordination of disaster response
• By extending and reusing existing ontologies
• Focuses on six questions that are essential to coping
with an emergency or a disaster:
• what has happened
• what can be done
• who can take actions
• what resources
• when and where the event has occurred12 Overview of the Semantic Framework 12 subject areas • People • Organisation • Disaster • Operation • Resource • Geo-location • Time • Damage • Infrastructure • Hydrology • Meteorology • Topography
13
Overview of the Semantic Framework
People Section Organisation Section Disaster Section
Class Class Class
foaf:Person org:Organisation Disaster
First responder Governmental agency Natural disaster
Fire fighter Fire brigade Fire
Police Police Flood
Ambulance crew Ambulance Technological disaster
Incident Commander Local authority Conflict disaster
ResourceUnitChief Nongovernmental organisation Object Property
Object Property Object Property time:hasBeginning
hasEmployer v:email org:hasUnit org:hasSite time:hasDurationDescription
foaf:based_near v:phone org:hasPost org:siteAddress Datatype Property
v:address org:heldBy
incidentId
Datatype Property Datatype Property
foaf:name foaf:title skos:prefLabel
foaf:familyName workStatus org:purpose
foaf:givenName org:identifier
Operation Section Resource Section Geo-Location Section Time Section
Class Class Class Class
Operation Resource geosparql:Feature time:TemporalEntity
FirstResponderOperation Facility Incident origin time:Instant
PoliceOperation Camp Incident boundary DisasterStart
FiremanOperation Command post Check-in location OperationStart
EMSOperation Material Incident command post OperationEnd
Resource assignment Equipment Incident base time:ProperInterval
Object Property Vehicle Staging area Disaster
attackIncident hasAssignment Object Property Helispot Operation
hasOperationChief assignedResource v:vCard Address Class Object Property
assignedResource
hasTeamLeader joinOperation Object Property time:hasBeginning
Datatype Property v:address time:hasDurationDescription
Datatype Property Datatype Property
dropOffPointTime Datatype Property
pickUpPointTime resourceID geo:lat time:inXSDDateTime
resourceStatus geo:long14
Overview of the Semantic Framework
Damage Section Infrastructure Section Hydrology Section
Class Class Class
Damage Infrastructure Hydrology
hxl:Deaths otn:feature Lake
hxl:Injured otn:geometric River
hxl:Missing otn:transfer_point Sea
hxl:Displaced otn:composite_attributes Spring
hxl:NonDisplaced otn:relationship Stream
Object Property Object Property
Object Property
Datatype Property Datatype Property
Datatype Property
Meteorology Section Topography Section
Class Class
Meteorology Topography
nnew:Weather cegis:BuiltUpArea
nnew:Humidity cegis:Division
nnew:Precipitation cegis:EcologicalRegime
nnew:Pressure cegis:Event
nnew:Visibility cegis:SurfaceWater
nnew:Wind cegis:Terrian
Object Property Object Property
Datatype Property Datatype Property15
The Semantic Framework: Operation Section
Operation Section
Task: activity to Class
attack an incident Operation
within a given FirstResponderOperation A hierarchy of
EMSOperation
operation period FiremanOperation super and sub
PoliceOperation classes
Prevention
Warning
Resource assignment
Resource Object Property
assignment: attackIncident hasAssignment
hasOperationChief assignedResource
Link instances
assignment of a hasTeamLeader of two classes
type of a resource
to a task Datatype Property
startTime dropOffPointTime
endTime pickUpPointTime
numberPersons Link instances
of a class to
literal values16 Ontology Construction Using Protégé
17 Cihai: Ontology for Emergency and Disaster Information Interoperability
Existing Ontologies Referenced By the Framework
Semantic Framework
1819
Use Case – Cihai at H4D2
• Cihai Ontology Project at the hackathon H4D2
• Unstructured Earthquake Data from GDACS
website
• Structured Data in RDF using Cihai Ontology
• Fuseki SPARQL data repository
• Cihai SPARQL endpoint
• Make queries to the SPARQL endpoint20
The End
Thank you
for your participation!
Disaster 2.0 Project
http://www.disaster20.eu/
Shuangyan Liu
s.liu10@aston.ac.ukYou can also read
