An Emergency-Driven Virtual Organization Model for Emergency Management Based on Ontology

The model presented in this paper is the main result of an on-going national science foundation project of China, called emergency-driven virtual organization (EDVO), which aims at building and developing an innovative software infrastructure (software, models, services, etc.) for supporting collaborative work of events handling in emergency/disaster scenarios. In such scenarios, different government's departments, belonging to different organizations, need to focus on the task of integrating, conforming and scheduling heterogeneous, distributed resources from multi-domains, as well as sharing knowledge among different organizations. Therefore, knowledge representation and sharing among the participating organizations become critical problems. A knowledge representation and sharing mechanism oriented to EDVO is proposed and a corresponding support platform is designed and developed. It is shown in practice that the model is able to solve the problem of knowledge sharing in different organizations in certain EDVO and improves cooperation among those departments.