The Role of Ontologies and Linked Open Data in Support of Disaster Management

Abstract

An increasing number of disasters, of natural and anthropogenic origin, enhance the importance of the current role played by disaster management (DM) decision support systems regarding the actions at the different phases of the DM cycle. Disaster management is known for the heterogeneity of domain’s concepts, the kind of resources deployed for disaster response, and the complexity of the information that needs to be shared among the several organizations participating in a catastrophe scenario. The adoption of common ontologies enables information sharing among them. An exploratory systematic review of ontologies was developed to collect references of already proposed ontologies for the realm of DM, and to identify underexplored topics, and research gaps, which may hamper the semantic alignment of DM decision support systems. Further to this, the goal of the study is to envision a potential evolution of DM decision support systems toward better decision-making processes along the DM cycle, specifically, concerning the synergistic role toward interoperability and collaboration of fusing data and automatically extracting information from the several available distributed sources using Ontologies and Linked Open Data as tools.