Emergency Ontology construction in emergency decision support system

Decision-makers in emergencies usually need supports of background knowledge and information for decision-making support. Emergency documentation can partially provide such supports through its effective reorganization according to various incident scenarios. This paper aims at constructing Emergency Ontology to support decision-making directly from such emergency documentation. Borrowing ideas from the Activity-First Method (AFM) methodology, we propose a stepping method in ontology construction, and use it to build up an Emergency Ontology from the facet of Avian Influenza. The emergency documents which are decomposed to knowledge pieces for further integration according to emergent incidents. Therefore, the Emergency Ontology is proved to be effective in knowledge reorganization.