An Ontology for Sharing and Managing Information in Disaster Response: In Flood Response Usage Scenarios

Abstract

Information management and sharing is an essential ingredient, but a difficult and challenging problem for disaster response management due to the large number of heterogeneous concepts used in different organizations. To solve this problem, the number of those heterogeneous concepts has to be reduced. This paper proposes an ontology as a solution to reduce the large number of concepts by understanding only on necessary ontological concepts needed in communication via speech act between the organizations. This is a new approach where the ontology provides a conceptual representation of the disaster response domain from the perspective of communication between the organizations involved. More specifically, the ontology was designed and developed by using the concept of interlocking institutional worlds, in which speech act theory is used as a foundation to present interactions among the organizations, and by using philosophically grounded foundational ontologies. To make this whole approach work, we show an important demonstration of the utility of our proposed work, which is in the expatiation quadrant of the Design Science Research methodology on designing our domain ontology for disaster response management.