Common vocabularies for collective intelligence - work in progress

Web based applications and tools offer a great potential to increase the effectiveness of information flow and improve communication among disparate agents in support of distributed operations. One of the factors that hinders the integration and interoperability of information models, is a lack of common, shared vocabularies. This paper discusses research aimed at placing shared vocabularies at the heart of collective intelligence domain, and reports about work in progress of an effort being incubated toward the development of a metadata set aimed at mapping and unifying different vocabularies used in emergency management, and furthers previous work initiated toward the development of a common ontology in this area.