Developing Conceptual Models for Disaster Management

Mr. Mehtab Afzal received his Master s degree in Computer Science from COMSATS Institute of Information Technology Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2009. He worked as a Research Associate for two years and as a Lecturer for one year. Currently, he is a PhD Scholar at Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China.

A disaster is the impact of natural or man-made hazard and all the disasters require mitigation measures. Current Disaster Management Systems are dependent upon manual data entry, analysis, and decision making. Semantic Web technologies have actively been used for the development of intelligent and self governed web based system. These systems include the use of XML, RDF and ontologies for formulation and semantic interpretation of data. The ontology defines rules essential to search the data from unstructured world i.e., World Wide Web, which are later used for information extraction and reasoning purpose. Various disasters related ontologies have been considered but none conceptualizes the domain completely. Most of the ontologies are designed for the specific purpose in the domain like the disaster plans, the task ontology for the emergency operation center. We have developed disaster ontology which almost covers every important aspect of disasters like disaster type, disaster date, losses including human loss as well as infrastructure loss, services, service providers, disaster location, and relief items etc.