Ontology for Developing Web Sites for Natural Disaster Management: Methodology and Implementation

Recent natural disasters have highlighted the need for disaster preparedness, planning, and management. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the usefulness of Web sites in dealing with natural disasters. However, little is known about the necessary contents and structures of Web-based information systems for natural disaster management. In this paper, we focus on developing an ontology structure of elements for Web-based disaster management systems. Web elements are identified, following a grounded-theory approach, from an inventory of 6032 Web pages drawn from 100 disaster management Web sites. Selected semi-structured data representation approaches are used to organize the resulting ontology structure, which consists of 2094 Web elements. The ontology structure is further coded into a Web-based system, allowing easy online access.