Emergency response ontology informatics: using ontologies to improve emergency and hazard management

The Large-scale natural and man-made hazards and disasters sometimes triggered and/or encouraged by regional conflicts, climate change, or migration are growing in intensity and frequency. These disasters, affecting thousands of homes and lives, have consequences for national security and defense. Adequate preparation, response and recovery are required to manage the effects of such large-scale disasters. With many organisations involved in their handling, often times crossing regional and national borders, information exchange is crucial in order to help save lives and properties. Very often, this information exchange is cumbersome and difficult due to differing vocabularies, semantics and representations at the human language, systems and data levels. This paper describes HERO, the Hazard and Emergency Response Ontology, a vocabulary used to describe hazards, either emerging, existing or ones that might have happened. Having a common vocabulary to describe hazards will give emergency management officials a common language (or a common set of terms) to describe an event, a disaster, or a hazard, making the information exchange between differing political and social boundaries easier, more efficient and more effective. We describe how we have made use of HERO to help us to model migration hazard data. We end with lessons learnt and conclusions