Semantic representations of actors and resource allocation through reasoning in humanitarian crises

Abstract

Humanitarian reporting is the backbone of responses to humanitarian crises, which is based on various types of decision making, mostly taken at the highest level by those who fund the humanitarian response. The lack of accurate information is a well-known problem, which increases the risk of failure and may affect humanitarian response. In this paper we illustrate how each situation in crises can be described through the semantic representations of actors potentially involved in it, for the purpose of deciding on their correct engagement in humanitarian responses. Consequently, we underpin the automatic resource allocation for humanitarian response with computations based on OWL/SWRL enabled ontologies and reasoning. The prototype has been implemented as a software application created with Java technologies, which utilizes OWL-API and runs the proposed reasoning process. © 2014 IEEE.