An Ontological Approach to Conceptual Modeling of Disaster Management

Disaster management increasingly depends on various information systems, such as modeling and simulation systems or visualization and geographical information systems, to support decision makers at various stages of a disaster. The conceptual modeling of the domain for such systems is challenging, especially for IT developers new to the field. In this paper we present three ontologies that reflect three different views to a sub domain of disaster management at different levels of granularity. We compare the ontologies and discuss how a high-level model can separate concerns of various stakeholders into logical layers of abstraction, facilitate understanding of the domain, and inform development of various application systems.