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

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