Emergency Alerts for all: an ontology based approach to improve accessibility in emergency alerting systems

11 pages, 7 figures.-- Contributed to: 5th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Respose and Management (ISCRAM2008, Washington, DC, USA, May 4-7 2008).When a disaster occurs it is critical that emergency response information systems share a common ontology to support their disaster management alerting functions and notifications. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so it is crucial, for emergency systems, to be able to transmit them to all kinds of recipients. An ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deaf people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages and contents over different emergency response information systems and to be accessible under different conditions and for different kind of users.This work has been partly funded by UIA4SIGE (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TSI2007-60388) and MDDSIGE (CAM-UC3M CCG06-UC3M/TIC-0787) projects.Publicad

CAP-ONES: An Emergency Notification System for all

10 pages, 7 figures.-- Contributed to: 6th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Respose and Management (ISCRAM2009, Göteborg, Sweden, May 10-13, 2009).Later published as article in: International Journal of Emergency Management, vol. 6, n. 3-4, p. 302-316 (11 February 2010), http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJEM.2009.031568In this paper we present an ontology-based system for managing emergency alert notifications. Our purpose is to generate emergency alerts that are accessible to different kinds of people, paying special attention to more vulnerable collectives like impaired people. By adapting alerts to different devices and users we can allow Emergency Management Systems (EMS) to communicate with collectives like blind or deaf people whom otherwise will be unreachable by usual channels. Moreover, if we consider the constrains imposed by the nature of the emergency situations we can also improve the information transmission to cope with situational disabilities (e.g. smoke during a fire can cause low vision problems). We centered our system architecture on two characteristics: the first one is an ontology that codifies knowledge about accessibility, devices, disabilities, emergencies and media so the alert notification can be tailored according to different parameters; the second one is the use of an open standard like the CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) that enables our system to interoperate with other existing systems.This work has been partly funded by the UIA4SIGE project (Ministry of Science and Innovation TSI2007-60388).Publicad

Toward the use of upper level ontologies for semantically interoperable systems: an emergency management use case

In the context of globalization and knowledge management, information technologies require an ample need of unprecedented levels of data exchange and sharing to allow collaboration between heterogeneous systems. Yet, understanding the semantics of the exchanged data is one of the major challenges. Semantic interoperability can be ensured by capturing knowledge from diverse sources by using ontologies and align these latter by using upper level ontologies to come up with a common shared vocabulary. In this paper, we aim in one hand to investigate the role of upper level ontologies as a mean for enabling the formalization and integration of heterogeneous sources of information and how it may support interoperability of systems. On the other hand, we present several upper level ontologies and how we chose and then used Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper level ontology and Common Core Ontology (CCO) as a mid-level ontology to develop a modular ontology that define emergency responders’ knowledge starting from firefighters’ module for a solution to the semantic interoperability problem in emergency management

INTELLECTUAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN THE ACTIVITIES OF THE EMERGENCY RESCUE SERVICE

The paper considers the features of the use of intelligent information technologies in the process of the emergency rescue service of the enterprise. To improve the efficiency of the rescue services, it is necessary to carry out strategic planning and management, which would be designed to prevent the occurrence of an emergency (emergency). Effective subsystems of emergency proactive planning should not only predict the occurrence of possible emergencies, but also provide for appropriate preventive measures, and emphasis should be placed on eliminating the underlying causes, not the emerging consequences. The change of modes in the event of an emergency can be effectively implemented through the deployment of a technologically secured situational center. Decisions in emergency situations are made in various operational situations, including crisis, and in extremely limited time. Nevertheless, they must be taken in a timely manner, be as reasonable as possible, and ensure the fullest and most effective use of available opportunities. Decision-making processes can be based on the personal experience of participants in the management process. As you carry out your professional activity, experience is formed, which subsequently allows you to perform some tasks much faster and more efficiently. To gain experience, it is proposed to use a knowledge management system based on ontology. In order to ensure maximum awareness of the management of the situation, it is proposed to use the expert system of the situation center. (ES SC) The ES of the situational center of the authorities can significantly improve the efficiency of management processes and provides information support for strategic and tactical management decision-making. The ES should implement tools for a comprehensive and operational assessment of the state of the management object and situational analysis of the identified problems

SEMA4A: An ontology for emergency notification systems accessibility

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. Reaching this goal is challenging due to users’ diversity: people with disabilities, elderly and children, and other vulnerable groups. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for such systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deafblind people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages over distinct emergency response information systems providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users.Ministerio de Educación y Cienci

empathi: An ontology for Emergency Managing and Planning about Hazard Crisis

In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors and social media content generated by local people. A bold obstacle to capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts concerning with the domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises. Although empathi has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary concepts and relations being essential in this domain. This ontology is available at https://w3id.org/empathi/

Semantic reasoning for intelligent emergency response applications

Emergency response applications require the processing of large amounts of data, generated by a diverse set of sensors and devices, in order to provide for an accurate and concise view of the situation at hand. The adoption of semantic technologies allows for the definition of a formal domain model and intelligent data processing and reasoning on this model based on generated device and sensor measurements. This paper presents a novel approach to emergency response applications, such as fire fighting, integrating a formal semantic domain model into an event-based decision support system, which supports reasoning on this model. The developed model consists of several generic ontologies describing concepts and properties which can be applied to diverse context-aware applications. These are extended with emergency response specific ontologies. Additionally, inference on the model performed by a reasoning engine is dynamically synchronized with the rest of the architectural components. This allows to automatically trigger events based on predefined conditions. The proposed ontology and developed reasoning methodology is validated on two scenarios, i.e. (i) the construction of an emergency response incident and corresponding scenario and (ii) monitoring of the state of a fire fighter during an emergency response

Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies

Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could become vulnerable because of exceptional circumstances such as stress, an unknown environment or even visual impairment (e.g. fire causing smoke). Within this scope, a crucial activity is to notify affected people about safe places and available evacuation routes. In order to address this need, we propose to extend an ontology, called SEMA4A (Simple EMergency Alert 4 [for] All), developed in a previous work for managing knowledge about accessibility guidelines, emergency situations and communication technologies. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic technique for knowledge acquisition and modeling on accessible evacuation routes. We introduce a use case to show applications of the ontology and conclude with an evaluation involving several experts in evacuation procedures. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved