Skip to main content
Article
From Glossaries to Ontologies: Disaster Management Domain
The Twenty-Third International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering
  • Katarina Grolinger, Western University
  • Kevin P Brown
  • Miriam A.M. Capretz, Western University
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
1-1-2011
Disciplines
Abstract

Our society’s reliance on a variety of critical infrastructures (CI) presents significant challenges for disaster preparedness, response and recovery. Experts from different domains including police, paramedics, firefighters and various other CI teams are involved in the fast paced response to a disaster, increasing the risk of miscommunication. To ensure clear communication, as well as to facilitate CI software interoperability, a common disaster ontology is needed. We propose using the knowledge stored in domain glossaries, vocabularies and dictionaries for the creation of a lightweight disaster management domain ontology. Glossaries, vocabularies and dictionaries are semi structured representations of domain knowledge, where significant human effort has been invested in choosing relevant terms, determining their definitions, acronyms, synonyms and sometimes even relations. We use that knowledge built into semi formatted documents for ontology learning. In particular, we look at five glossaries/vocabularies from the disaster management domain and analyze their content similarity and structure. A lightweight disaster ontology is created exploiting the structure of the semi-structured source documents.

Citation Information
Katarina Grolinger, Kevin P Brown and Miriam A.M. Capretz. "From Glossaries to Ontologies: Disaster Management Domain" The Twenty-Third International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (2011) p. 402 - 407
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/katarina_grolinger/9/