Towards the Use of Upper Ontologies for Refugee Emergencies in Disaster Management

Disaster information, such as information on earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fire, hazard chemicals, hurricanes, etc., is usually rapidly changeable, ambiguous, and huge. It often involves data items from diverse domains on the web, some of which have similar meanings but appear structurally dissimilar in different data sources. A promising remedy is to provide a basis for common understanding of disaster management in a formally correct way. Formal upper ontologies provide rich vocabularies for describing an information system, and they form a basis for defining abstract data types that support interoperation among heterogeneous systems. Development of an ontology for Humanitarian Aid for Refugee in Emergencies (HARE) is presented throughout this work.