Towards ontology-driven situation-aware disaster management

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.