Di Maio Ontology for ER AN OPEN ONTOLOGY FOR OPEN SOURCE EMERGENCY RESPONSE SYSTEM Paola Di Maio Mae Fa Luang University, Chiang Rai, Thailand www.mfu.ac.th Paola.dimaio@gmail.com paola@mfu.ac.th ABSTRACT Emergency Response and Relief Coordination Efforts are evolving to leverage the efficiencies offered by the internet in the area of real time communication among agents and stakeholders. There is widespread consensus both in the technical and ER community that to improve efficiency of response, information must be shared and web based protocols must be used [22]. In addition to known technical and non-technical obstacles that inhibit the effective and seamless coordination of operations, we identify issues that challenge the development of functional information and communication models. Recent studies in ontology engineering, and evidence from direct observations of open-source work groups in this field, point to the need for an easy to use 'open' conceptual and semantic framework, defined here broadly as ‘Open Ontology’ (OOnt), and a corresponding design and implementation methodology that can be referenced unambiguously and universally by developers and users of information systems designed to support ER operations. Keywords Open Source, Collaboration, Semantic Web, Ontology, Knowledge, Emergency Response, Emergency Management, Engineering, Standards 1. INTRODUCTION In the last couple of years there have been world scale natural disasters of epic proportions: the tsunami of December 2005, hurricane Katrina, a massive earthquake in Pakistan, and the most recent Java Indonesia humanitarian crisis, are some examples. While natural disasters are nothing new in the history of humanity, the availability of new ICT technologies, especially the Internet and related web based applications constitute an ideal pervasive, real time and distributed platform theoretically well suited to optimize data exchange, and consequently increase the flow of information, resulting in improved coordination among emergency response and crises relief service providers. Large scale communication and coordination failures instead systematically characterize global scale ER operations [1, 2], and are largely caused by complex historical, political and cultural conflicts among people and societies that are beyond the scope of IT systems. 1.1. Goals, scope and contribution In this paper we acknowledge that the lack of an open, easy to reference, sufficiently generic common conceptual and semantic framework for defining information exchange concepts, terminology and data formats in the event of a global, or large scale regional 'disaster' results from historical different 'views of the world' among various ER service providers, agencies and organizations, and helps to perpetrate poor communication, therefore to poor cooperation, among them – thus preventing synergies and 'network efficiencies to take place among the ER community. The goal of this paper is primarily to raise awareness of the critical, complex and difficult to grasp issue , which is perceived as a central weakness in the sector, and as a starting point to encourage further research. As the result of direct observation of distributed and heterogeneous operating and development environments, as well as review of key research findings, the following sections attempt to define at least in part the problem set and propose steps towards integration of conceptual and semantic in standard engineering practices, but that can also suitable for open source and rapid deployment environments. Our research identifies and aligns key issues that relate to the information society at large, namely the challenges and opportunities deriving from the integration of different disciplines and fields of research. It documents and captures some of the working knowledge that is being generated 1