Exploring ontology potential in emergency management

Emergency response is a complex activity involving many actors and heterogeneous spatial data. One of the major challenges is the integration and understanding of these data by all the actors. While quite significant progress on system and syntax heterogeneity of data has been made, semantics issues are still insufficiently addressed. This papers discusses the possibility for applying ontology to resolve the semantic heterogeneity in emergency response. The paper introduces the interoperability problem by presenting a case study. Then, the basic ontology technology is introduced and discussed with respect to the emergency response processes. Finally, we present our concept on how to realize the semantic interoperability in emergency management.