An Ontology-based Framework for Semantic Reconciliation in Humanitarian Aid in Emergency Information Systems

Humanitarian aid in an emergency information system involves information from multidisciplinary environments. A lot of information is stored in relational databases. Semantic interoperability between existing relational databases and ontologies still remains a major practical issue. In order to avoid a combinatorial explosion of terminology alignment among different systems, we designed a pivot ontology framework, and present a pivot construction methodology and a PivotOntology-to-Database schema matching methodology. The first methodology is adopted from an ontology engineering technique, and the second one is based on a linguistic relation approach. To integrate humanitarian aid in emergency information from several databases, the Humanitarian Aid for Refugees in Emergencies (HARE) ontology has been proposed. Coverage of the HARE ontology is evaluated with respect to comparison against knowledge sources, and matching with existing systems. The evaluations demonstrate that the HARE ontology is broadly compatible with existing database schemas.

[1]  Mitsuru Ikeda,et al.  Ontology Construction and Schema Merging Using an Application-Independent Ontology for Humanitarian Aid in Disaster Management , 2014, JIST.

[2]  M. Careem,et al.  Sahana: Overview of a Disaster Management System , 2006, 2006 International Conference on Information and Automation.

[3]  Asunción Gómez-Pérez,et al.  METHONTOLOGY: From Ontological Art Towards Ontological Engineering , 1997, AAAI 1997.

[4]  Jérôme Euzenat,et al.  A Survey of Schema-Based Matching Approaches , 2005, J. Data Semant..

[5]  Adam Pease,et al.  The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology: A Large Ontology for the Semantic Web and its Applic ations , 2002 .

[6]  Mike Uschold,et al.  A Framework for Understanding and Classifying Ontology Applications , 1999 .

[7]  M. Felisa Verdejo,et al.  Textual Entailment Recognition Based on Dependency Analysis and WordNet , 2005, MLCW.

[8]  Michael Uschold,et al.  Ontologies: principles, methods and applications , 1996, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[9]  Werner Kuhn,et al.  Ontology-based discovery of geographic information services - An application in disaster management , 2006, Comput. Environ. Urban Syst..

[10]  Erhard Rahm,et al.  Generic Schema Matching with Cupid , 2001, VLDB.

[11]  Wen Hui,et al.  An owl-based knowledge representation framework for searching semantically emergency preplan , 2009, 2009 ISECS International Colloquium on Computing, Communication, Control, and Management.

[12]  Erhard Rahm,et al.  A survey of approaches to automatic schema matching , 2001, The VLDB Journal.

[13]  Jay F. Nunamaker,et al.  A Knowledge Management Framework for the Support of Decision Making in Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief , 2002, Knowledge and Information Systems.

[14]  Amit P. Sheth,et al.  The SSN ontology of the W3C semantic sensor network incubator group , 2012, J. Web Semant..

[15]  Asunción Gómez-Pérez,et al.  Ontological Engineering: With Examples from the Areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and the Semantic Web , 2004, Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing.

[16]  Ismael Navas-Delgado,et al.  Semantic Fields: Finding Ontology Relationships , 2009, DEXA 2009.

[17]  Erhard Rahm,et al.  Generic schema matching, ten years later , 2011, Proc. VLDB Endow..

[18]  Andreas Abecker,et al.  Semantic Web Services , 2008 .

[19]  Steffen Staab,et al.  Knowledge Processes and Ontologies , 2001, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[20]  Ajay Tripathi,et al.  Developing a modular hydrogeology ontology by extending the SWEET upper-level ontologies , 2008, Comput. Geosci..

[21]  Kevin Knight,et al.  Toward Distributed Use of Large-Scale Ontologies t , 1997 .

[22]  Aris M. Ouksel,et al.  A classification of semantic conflicts in heterogeneous database systems , 1995, J. Organ. Comput..

[23]  Erhard Rahm,et al.  Schema and ontology matching with COMA++ , 2005, SIGMOD '05.

[24]  Sisi Zlatanova,et al.  Ontologies for Disaster Management Response , 2007 .

[25]  Mitsuru Ikeda,et al.  Towards the Use of Upper Ontologies for Refugee Emergencies in Disaster Management , 2013 .

[26]  Martin L. King,et al.  Towards a Methodology for Building Ontologies , 1995 .

[27]  Robert L. Grossman,et al.  Data integration in a bandwidth-rich world , 2003, CACM.

[28]  Michael Gruninger,et al.  Methodology for the Design and Evaluation of Ontologies , 1995, IJCAI 1995.