Towards ontology-driven situation-aware disaster management

João Moreira*, Luis Ferreira Pires, Marten van Sinderen, Patricia Dockhorn Costa

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

    16 Citations (Scopus)
    96 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Over the last years, numerous ICT applications with mechanisms to detect situations have been developed to support disaster management (DM), which is a field of a great societal and economic importance. Those applications are termed situation-aware (SA) because they try, in near real-time, to perceive and comprehend a situation of some type (e.g. disease epidemics) and project a reaction to the detected situation (e.g. isolate diseased people). An obstacle to the modelling of SA applications is the lack of well-founded structural and temporal constructs, which is inherent to conventional design techniques. Ontology-driven conceptual modelling has been successfully applied to overcome this issue, where ontological analysis based on a foundational ontology supports the modelling of concepts within a specific field as a well-founded core ontology. In this paper we discuss the importance of a well-founded core ontology for DM to support the specification of SA applications. We give an overview of the comprehensive framework we are developing, in which the DM core ontology plays a prominent role in the development of SA applications. In particular, we discuss the challenge of harmonizing concepts related to the modelling of situations in a foundational ontology in the lights of the Barwisean situation theory, Situoid theory and Situation awareness theory. This challenge has to be addressed to properly support SA applications in DM.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)339-353
    Number of pages15
    JournalApplied ontology
    Volume10
    Issue number3-4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2015

    Keywords

    • 2023 OA procedure
    • Disaster management
    • situation-aware application
    • foundational ontology
    • core ontology
    • situation theory
    • situoid
    • SE-MDA: Model Driven Architecture

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