"What exactly is a lockdown?": Towards an Ontology-based modeling of lockdown interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic posed several research opportunities raised by the huge amount of data collected and made available at an unprecedented rate. However, this also raised important challenges for manipulating all this data and extracting knowledge from it, due to the lack of semantically precise definitions. In particular, several locations imposed lockdown measures for some periods, with different meanings among them. These semantic differences might help to explain why different countries - which at first sight enforced similar sets of interventions - evolved in a completely distinct way with respect to the propagation rate of COVID-19. In this work, we report an ontological analysis of some lockdown interventions. These interventions are classified in the same category in a taxonomy provided by a worldwide initiative that tracks information on interventions from governments of several countries taken to tackle COVID-19. However, as our analysis shows, there are important ontological distinctions among them. Based on these results, we propose an initial version of a domain ontology that represents lockdown as a complex non-pharmaceutical intervention type, which is composed of interventions of several natures, and that provides a legal perspective of some of its composing interventions using patterns from the UFO-L legal core ontology.