An ontology-based framework for semantic reconciliation in humanitarian aid in Emergency information systems

Abstract

Humanitarian aid in an emergency information system involves information from multidisciplinary environments. A lot of information is stored in relational databases. Semantic interoperability between existing relational databases and ontologies still remains a major practical issue. In order to avoid a combinatorial explosion of terminology alignment among different systems, we designed a pivot ontology framework, and present a pivot construction methodology and a PivotOntology-to-Database schema matching methodology. The first methodology is adopted from an ontology engineering technique, and the second one is based on a linguistic relation approach. To integrate humanitarian aid in emergency information from several databases, the Humanitarian Aid for Refugees in Emergencies (HARE) ontology has been proposed. Coverage of the HARE ontology is evaluated with respect to comparison against knowledge sources, and matching with existing systems. The evaluations demonstrate that the HARE ontology is broadly compatible with existing database schemas.