Geo-information and

formal semantics for

disaster management

PhD Research Proposal

Wei Xu, MSc



GISt Report No. 46 December 2007

Geo-information and formal
semantics for disaster
management

PhD Research Proposal

Wei Xu, MSc


GISt Report No. 46 December 2007

Summary



This proposal contains the research plan for the PhD research Geo-information and
Formal Semantics for Disaster Management". It describes relevant backgrounds, goals,
phasing, research questions and the planning. The research will be carried out in four-year
period during 2006-2010. This research is closely related to a Dutch project GDI4DM
(Geo-spatial Data Infrastructure for Disaster Management) and European project
Humboldt. This PhD project will investigate the usage of ontology to formally describe
the semantics of geo information for disaster management. It is the assumption that with
the help of ontology the semantics of geo information can be explicitly expressed in order
to enable machine-automation for disaster management. Questions such as "what is the
added value of formal semantics for geo-information", "How can formal semantics be
used" will be answered after the PhD research.
ISBN: 978-90-77029-22-0
ISSN: 1569-0245
2007 Section GIS technology
OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies
TU Delft
Jaffalaan 9, 2628 BX Delft, the Netherlands
Tel.: +31 (0)15 278 4548; Fax +31 (0)15-278 2745
Websites: http://www.otb.tudelft.nl
http://www.gdmc.nl

E-mail: wei.xu@tudelft.nl

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or incorporated into any
information retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

The Section GIS technology accepts no liability for possible damage resulting from the findings of this
research or the implementation of recommendations.
Table of Contents
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 Motivation example discovery and integration of geo-information . . . . . 5
1.3 Interoperability problems Dierent hierarchical levels and problems with
integration of geo-information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2 State-of-the-art technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1 Formal Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2 Ontologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.3 Ontologies architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.4 Approaches to create ontologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.5 Ontologies for Disaster Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3 PhD research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.1 Research Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.2 Relations and roles with projects involved . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.3 Research Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.4 Topics beyond the PhD research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4 Research Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4.1 PhD research agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4.2 Organisation Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Page 1 of 31
Abstract
This proposal contains the research plan for the PhD research Geo-information and Formal
Semantics for Disaster Management. It describes relevant backgrounds, goals, phasing, re-
search questions and the planning. The research will be carried out in four-year period during
2006-2010. This research is closely related to a Dutch project GDI4DM (Geo-spatial Data
Infrastructure for Disaster Management) and European project Humboldt. This PhD project
will investigate the usage of ontology to formally describe the semantics of geo information
for disaster management. It is the assumption that with the help of ontology the seman-
tics of geo information can be explicitly expressed in order to enable machine-automation
for disaster management. Questions such as what is the added value of formal semantics
for geo-information, How can formal semantics be used will be answered after thePhD
research.
Page 2 of 31
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Background
Increasing numbers of natural and man-made disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, oods,
air crashes, have posed a challenge to public services and demonstrated the importance of
disaster management. The ve phases of disaster management, namely mitigation, preven-
tion, preparedness, response and recovery [45], have urged collaboration among various users
such as the Fire Brigade, Police, Medical Services, the Municipality (local authorities), Red
Cross, urban planners and even amongst dierent countries.
Research is carried out and large investments are made in the area of disaster management
(the list is just an indication but not an exhaustive one). For example, the following projects
range from the preparedness to disaster recovery (a more complete list is available on www.
psc.europe.eu).
DIPECHO (DIsaster Preparedness European Commissions Humanitarian aid depart-
ment) is an European Unions program which supports training, capacity-building,
awareness-rasing and early-warning (website: http://ec.europa.eu/echo/field/
dipecho/index_en.htm).
EU-MEDIN (Euro-Mediterranean Disaster Information Network) promotes the shar-
ing of disaster-related information and data, research, results, knowledge and expertise.
It aims at harmonizing methods to improve pre-disaster planning as well as hazard, vul-
nerability and risk assessments (website: http://www.eu-medin.org/).
GMES (Global Monitoring for Enviroment and Security) aims at an eort to bring
data and information providers together with users, so they can better understand each
other and make environmental and security-related information available to the people
who need it through enhanced or new services (website: http://www.gmes.info/).
ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Manage-
ment) is another European Union project, which sets the goal to design and implement
an open service oriented architecture that will improve the interoperability among actors
involved in Multi-Risk Management (website: http://www.eu-orchestra.org/).
OASIS (Open Advanced System for crisIS management) is an Integrated Project which
focuses on the Crisis Management part of improving risk management. It aims to dene
a generic crisis management system to support the response and rescue operations in
case of large scale disasters (website: http://www.oasis-fp6.org/).
WIN (Wide Information Network) targets at a wide range of opportunities at Euro-
pean and regional level, on several thematic, for instance, shoreline monitoring, water
resources management, and various land-based risks management domain (website:
http://www.win-eu.org/).
The success of disaster management not only depends on well-dened policies and proce-
dures, but also largely depends on the successful integration of related information to make
decisions during the response phase. In the response phase, people involved have to deal
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with large amount of existing and operational data under a unpredictable and time-critical
manner. Therefore the response phase is the most appealing one among all the phases of
disaster management. During the response phase, it is needed to ensure the interoperability
of emergency service (as well as information), to provide appropriate information at the right
place and in the right moment [46].
This information ranges from existing data, such as topographic data, available transportation
means, demographic data, to operational data, such as weather forecasts, available rescuing
resources units distributions, measurements from the eld and so on. Most of them are
geographically related. Therefore when talking about integrating information for disaster
management response, it refers to the integrating of geo-information. The importance of
geographical information has also been mentioned by Goodchild F. M. [23] and by Cutter et
al. [7].
However, successfully discovering and combining geo-information in a time-critical manner
for use in decision making is not an easy task, because geo-information is distributed among
dierent organisations. On one hand, those organisations possess parts of emergency re-
lated knowledge. On the other, they also collect, create and maintain data for other tasks
and purposes. Exchanging those geo-information data (and knowledge) by interacting on a
personal/phone/fax basis is a slow process, which may be prone to human error or inter-
operability issues. Developing methods to automate collection of geo-information, through
machine automation, will enable the integration of needed information in a time critical
manner to aid decision making during a disaster.
Current eorts to integrate geo-information data have been restricted to keyword-based-
matching Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) [10]. SDIs are being set up within regions, coun-
tries or even across national borders ([4] and [33]) to facilitate the access to geo-information.
SDI supports the discovery and retrieval of distributed geo-information sources and geo-
information services by providing catalogue services and syntactic interoperability standards
[22]. In the rest of this proposal, SII (Spatial Information Infrastructure) will be used instead
of SDI.
An example of a recently started international SII is the European Unions INSPIRE (IN-
frastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe) directive, which aims at making available
relevant, harmonised and quality geographic information for the purpose of formulation, im-
plementation, monitoring and evaluation of Community policy-making. It has the ideas that
i). Data should be collected once and maintained at an appropriate level. ii). Seamless
combination of spatial data from dierent sources and sharing of them should be enabled
to various users and applications. iii). Spatial data should be collected at one level and
shared among all dierent levels of government. vi). The discovery of spatial data should be
made available ([31] and [20]). The US DHS (US Data model for Homeland Security) is the
result from NSDI (National Spatial Data Infrastructure) in America [8]. The idea of NSDI,
resembling that of INSPIRE, is a physical, organisational and virtual network designed to
enable the development and sharing of the nations digital geographic information resources
in the U.S.A. [8].
The integration of geo-information has been greatly advanced by SII. However, semantic in-
teroperability, which challenges the integration of geo-information in the open and distributed
environments, still exists. One possible way to deal with these problems is to make the for-
mal semantics of geo-information available [20], so that dierent users involved in disaster
management can exchange and integrate their data, with the help of machine automation,to
do decision making in a time-critical manner.
Many eorts have been spent on specifying the semantics of geo-information nowadays. For
instance, ICS (Information Communities and Semantics) Working Group at OGC (Open
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Figure 1.1: Fire at a chemical plant and toxic gas leakage
Geospatial Consortium) addresses the issues related to services that might be developed
to help users manage semantic dierences in spatial data content and metadata. W3C
Geospatial Incubator Working Group aims at addressing issues of location and geographical
properties of resources for the Web of today and tomorrow . It lies the groundwork for a
more comprehensive geospatial ontology [21]. OpenKnowledge is an EU project aiming to
specify semantics in an appropriate way to provide a framework to enable a Semantic Web
like system to become open, in the sense that anyone can join and the cost of individual
participation is very low [34].
Many projects that deal with semantic interoperability address the use of ontologies, for
instance in [12], [28], [19]. In a recent PhD thesis, the author has also addressed the use of
ontologies to describe the semantics of geo-services [20]. Agarwal, reviews the use of ontologies
for GIS science and argues ontologies can help to deal with semantics interoperability problem
[1]. Ontologies have been an emerging technology since the last decade. It is believed to be
at least part of the solutions to semantic interoperability by describing formal semantics of
geo-information. This PhD research with title Geo-information and formal semantics
for disaster management focuses on using ontologies to describe formal semantics of
geo-information for the domain of disaster management. The added value of using formal
ontologies compared to traditional methods is going to be estimated.
1.2 Motivation example discovery and integration
of geo-information
Consider the following scenario: In gure 1.1, an accident is reported to a re station. An
explosion has happened at a chemical plant; toxic gas is leaking from destroyed pipes. In
order to evacuate the inhabitants of aected districts, a gasmal has to be created to plan an
evacuation and guide the rescue team. The forecast of the gas dispersion is an essential part
of this task.
Page 5 of 31
Please note that the scenario and figures are taken from work done between 2002 and 2004 at
the University of Muenster under the EU project ACE-GIS ((IST-2002-37724, http://www.ist-
world.org/ProjectDetails.aspx?ProjectId=b0731d0ad18642f0a55c3cbc978ecd0b).
Figure 1.2: Integration from various data sources
In order to manage such a disaster, information from dierent sources needs to be obtained
and combined immediately, which is shown in gure 1.2 (only an indication, not an exhausted
list of all the needed information). For instance, the plants ID, the plant location (the
exact location of the emission), the weather information the information of the wind from
weather station (the wind speed and wind direction near the place of the accident), are
depicted. Apart from what can be seen from gure 1.2, more information is needed, such
as the domain-specic data (the population of the potential area, road network and so on),
some on-the-y measured data from the eld (gas leakage), the weather forecast and so on,
to create a gasmal to make the evacuation and rescue plan.
As long as the incident location is identied, the weather information around the incident
area will be obtained. Together with the eld measurements, such as the emission rate of
the gas leak, these information is used to calculate the gasmal. The gas plume is presented
in a map, with the gasmal on top of the road network and topographic data of the region
(gure 1.2). In general, integrating dierent information and presenting in a single map
supports the coordination of the evacuation eciently.
Accessing and processing these heterogeneous information sources shall be done in the form
of a service. The service arranges multiple web services within a service composition. Such
a composition will be produced by a service composer whereas the gasmal is presented in
the resulting map. The processes of information discovery as well as integration are essential
within this scenario.
However it remains a problem as how to employ machines to help automate (or semi-
automate) the process of discovery and integration of information because the discovery and
integration of information in disaster management is time-critical and at the same time it is
impossible (or very dicult) for humans to do such when facing large amount of information.
Page 6 of 31
Figure 1.3: Semantic Interoperability
As shown in gure 1.2, it is required to nd the information of the wind direction and the
wind speed(Get Wind in gure 1.2), which can be achieved by typing and searching the
keyword wind or wind direction . A large amount of results will be returned, among
which will be chosen for answering the information about the wind speed and wind direction.
But there exists some problems which are illustrated in gure 1.3:
The attribute name wind direction in dierent geo-services (or data sets) may mean
the same thing, but with dierent data-type for storage (e.g., one with XML-Complex
Type and the other with String Type). (Same name with the same domain concept but
with dierent data-type.)
The attribute names wind direction and wind in dierent geo-services (or data
sets) are referring to the same thing the direction of the wind blowing from. (Dierent
names with the same domain concept and with the same data-type.)
The attribute name wind in dierent geo-services are referring to dierent things
one refers to the direction which the wind is blowing from and the other refers to the
one which the wind is blowing to. (Same name with same data-type but with dierent
domain concept.)
One needs to gure out what wind direction means in each data sources by examining
these heterogeneous data sources separately. However this trivial example is only one step
among many in disaster management. Without ontologies, too much time and eorts will be
wasted on examining heterogeneous data sources. By using ontologies, the semantics of these
heterogeneous data sources are made explicit. Rather than examining the heterogeneous
semantics for these data sources, the semantics of these data sources are made available by
ontologies, which are able to be processed by machines.
Ontologies are needed to formally describe the semantics of information so that machines can
help with the discovery and integration of information. And consequently, the disaster can
be managed in a much more ecient way. Under this idea, the proposal advcates ontologies.
With the help of ontologies, the meaning (semantic) of the information should have been
made explicit and machine-processable. In this PhD project, ontology is proposed to be used
to support information discovery and integration in disaster management.
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1.3 Interoperability problems Dierent hierarchical
levels and problems with integration of geo-information
The management of a disaster is a complex process. Due to various types and scales of dis-
asters, multiple organisations participate in the management work and numerous data are
required. It is also very unlikely that all agencies will ever standardise on a single system.
In reality, even within individual agencies there are multiple systems. This diversication is
true for disaster management. This section takes the management of disasters in the Nether-
lands as an example to illustrate the complexity of disaster management and interoperability
problems during disaster management.
1.3.1 Dierent hierarchical levels
Disaster management response involves multiple levels of cooperation of users from various
organisations, as well as dierent scales (dierent scales of details) of information that are
required by multiple users. For example, in the Netherlands, the Fire Brigade, the Police, the
Medical Service and the Municipality are the rst responders. Each of them is maintaining
their own data and is carrying their own daily work. In case of a disaster, they have to
cooperate with each other to deal with the disaster. Other institutions and organisations
such as Red Cross, Military forces, Ministry, and more extra-specialised organisations may
also get involved in managing the disaster when the magnitude of the disaster increases.
They require information at dierent scales of details. For instance, the Fire Brigade needs
more detailed information (such as the inner structure of a building) than the Queen does
(the area information).
To specify the cooperation and communication between dierent parties, 25 processes and six
GRIP (Common Regional Incident management Procedures) levels have been dened [45].
The disaster management is carried out as a combined action of several processes. Processes
are indicated as a series of connected activities, which take place simultaneously depending
on the type of the disaster. In the Netherlands, 25 processes are dened and organised by
clusters. For each cluster, there is one responsible sector (the Fire Brigade, the Police, the
Medical Service and the Municipality). Process 05 (observations and measurements) will be
activated in the example in 1.2, which will measure the leak of the toxic gas.
Apart from the processes, GRIP levels are also dened regarding to the scale of the disaster.
On GRIP 0, Fire Brigade, Police Medical Service and Municipality are doing their daily work.
There is not too much cooperation work among them. However, during GRIP 1, the mayor of
the Municipality will be informed. A cooperation team will be formed by the representatives
from each of these organisations. With the increase of the magnitude of the disaster, more
organisations are getting involved. For instance, emergency ocers at provincial or national
level are informed if the disaster aects a large section of the community; the Ministry of
International Aairs will take the administrative lead if the disaster extends beyond the
provincial; secretary of the the Queen will be informed if the disaster crosses the national
security (e.g., a nuclear leak). So with dierent levels of GRIP, dierent types of cooperation
are established and strict policies are used to form the structure to deal with disasters.
At the same time, users at dierent hierarchical levels are requiring dierent details of infor-
mation during disaster management. People working at the eld are requiring more detailed
information than those who work at higher levels. For instance, the Fire Brigade uses maps
that contain access paths for each building while the mayor of the Municipality uses GBKN
or TOP10NL maps, which are more general. Even the same user may require dierent levels
Page 8 of 31
of details or dierent content of information. For instance, a re brigade will participate in
ones daily work, such as giving advice to the storage of dangerous goods, or checking the
status of the buildings while in disaster management one is involved in giving the lead in the
eld, reporting the status of the eld and etc.
1.3.2 Integration of geo-information
As discussed above, dierent data sources are requested and have to be discovered, accessed,
collected and integrated. These data range from existing(rather static) data, such as topo-
graphical data, to operational (highly dynamic) data, such as the measurements from the
eld.
1. Existing data are those that are created and maintained by organisations before the
disaster happens. The existing data includes general purpose data and specic data. By
general purpose data, it refers to, i.e. the population data, hydrological data, ground
water data, the pipeline data, the topographic data and so on.
The specic data refer to those that are maintained by individual partners, especially
the municipalities and provinces, which have a multitude of these data available. Spe-
cic data are, i.e. transportation data, weather forecast and so on.
2. Operational data are those received from the eld during disaster management. They
are not available prior to a disaster. They could be a report (description) of an incident,
camera images, video clips, measurements, aerial surveys and so on.
Various users from multiple organisations have their own specic views on the problem, they
need dierent sub-sets of information from desperate data sources or combination of dierent
data sources. But these data are maintained or created by various organisations, for example,
Police, Fire Brigade, Medical Service, Municipalities, and some specialized organisations
(such as the mapping agencies, utility companies and so on), thus they are heterogeneous in
data model creation, data maintenance and data presentation:
Data model creation: Data are used for dierent purposes. Users create their specic
data to meet their own needs. They look at the problem from their own point of
view. Even when they are referring to the same problem, they might have dierent
interpretations. For instance, talking about water, users have distinct interests in it.
The people working for forecasting oods might only be concerned the height of the
water, while the people working for measuring the pollution might only have interests
in the chemicals in the water. Thus this results in dierent ways of interpreting and
modeling of the real world.
Maintenance: Data are stored in numerous formats. organisations are using various
technologies to collect and create their own data. Dierent storage systems are employed
to update and maintain the data. For example, the data could be les, a relational
database, graphics, text, picture or video clip and so on.
Presentation: Users are used to work with particular representations of data. And the
presentations are sometimes combined in data models. For instance, colors are usually
associated with meanings. The re brigade associate a red color with danger and a
green color with safety, while road surveyors use the colors only to distinguish among
dierent road networks.
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Interoperability problems will arise when integrating these individual data sources. When
talking about the word interoperability, it means that the ability of systems to provide
services to and accept services from other systems and to use the services so exchanged to
enable them to operate eectively together [27]. The idea of interoperability is due to the fact
that heterogeneity exists in information system, so it is the same with disaster management.
Due to dierent types of heterogeneity, there are corresponding dierent types of interop-
erability. Normally, the division is made as system interoperability, syntax and structure
interoperability and semantic interoperability [35]. System interoperability refers to the abil-
ity to deal with hardware, operating systems, and communications heterogeneity, such as
the instruction sets, communication protocols, le systems, naming, le types, operation and
so on. Syntax and structure (schematic) interoperability is relevant with machine-readable
aspects of data representation, formatting, data models, dierent DBMS (Data Base Man-
agement System). Semantic interoperability has more to do with the meaning of the data
content.
Semantics is the study of the meaning of expressions. It refers to the aspects of meanings that
expressed in a language, code, message or any other form of representation. Sheth argues that
semantic interoperability requires that the information system understands the semantics
of the users information request and those of information sources, and uses mediation or
information brokering to satisfy the information request as well as it can[35].
The semantic interoperability problem is not evadible due to the fact that the use of dierent
terms and approaches cause confusion in the specication of universally accepted entities,
concepts, rules, and relations. Apart from that, the semantics of the creation, maintenance
and representation of geo-information are not clear to the people outside the organisation.
Thus the semantics of these related data for disaster management response should be under-
stood by all the users involved in disaster management response, so that they could exchange
their information under high time pressure.
In order to achieve that, it is necessary to make the semantics of geo-information available
not only for humans but also for machines the semantics of geo-information needs to be
described in a machine processable way, so that the process of exchanging and integrating
large amount of data could be automated.
Page 10 of 31
Chapter 2: State-of-the-art technologies
2.1 Formal Semantics
Formal refers to the fact that something is represented in an articial and well-dened lan-
guage so that machines can process it. Usually four degrees of formalities are used in the
real world. They are, namely, informal, semi-formal, formal and rigorous formal. Informal
means knowledge is represented using human language. Semi-formal refers to the fact that
knowledge is expressed in a restricted and structured form of natural language, for instance
apply some patterns with human language. Knowledge represented at these two levels is
aimed at exchanging knowledge between human beings. Formal and rigorous formal repre-
sented knowledge is designed for machine processing. They are both dened in an articial
and well-dened language, while the latter one includes theories and proofs of properties such
as soundness and completeness.
Semantics, as discussed above, is the meaning of the information, message, words, maps
(graphic and symbols) and so on, which is expressed in a language, programmes, or other
forms for representation. Formal semantics species the meaning of the information, message
and so on are represented in a well-dened and articial way so that it could be processed
by machines.
If the formal semantics of geo-information can be successfully described, it will benet from
three aspects, which are shown in gure 2.1:
1. Data content: This concerns the content of the information locate and select relevant
information that satisfy the service request. For instance, give me all the relevant
information that is about the orientation of the road.
2. Service chain: This refers to the integration of the information composite and me-
diate relevant information based on their content (semantic). Based on the content
(semantic) of information, combine dierent information sources and solve mismatches
among them. For instance, the software which computes the gasmal needs to integrate
the information from the eld measurement, the weather information and other relevant
information.
3. Machine interface: This is regarded as, get the result and present it to the user an
automation of a question-answer process. For instance, in case of a re at a chemical,
input the relevant disaster type and alarm information, get a suggested evacuation plan
(Input: re A happens at location B, output: evacuation plan).
2.2 Ontologies
Ontologies is one of the emerging technologies that are used to describe formal semantics in
the past 10 years. In much research, ontology is used to represent the formal semantics. In
the following sections, ontologies are to be discussed.
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Figure 2.1: Benets from describing the semantics of geo-informatiion
The word ontology, originates in philosophy, which is the study of being or existence. It
seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to dene
entities and types of entities within its framework [14].
Computer science borrows this word from philosophy and according to Neches, one of the
earliest denitions for ontology in knowledge engineering, gives the denition of ontology as
denes the basic terms and relations comprising the vocabulary of a topic area as well as
the rules for combining terms and relations to dene extensions to the vocabulary [29].
Gruber denes ontology as an ontology is an explicit specication of a conceptualization[13].
Further, he proposes a terminological clarication among dierent uses of ontologies as, an
informal conceptual system, a formal semantic account, a specication of a conceptu-
alization, a representation of a conceptual system via a logical theory, the vocabulary
used by a logical theory and a specication of a logical theory[12]. Swartout in his paper
argues: An ontology is a hierarchically structured set of terms for describing a domain that
can be used as a skeletal foundation for a knowledge base[42]. Borst renes and extends
the denition of ontology as ontologies are dened as a formal specication of a shared
conceptualization[5].
These denitions are not exactly the same but they all reveal two key points of ontology
i) ontology is a kind of conceptualisation and ii) ontologies should be shared. According to
Studer and Uschold, conceptualisation is an abstract model of the real world phenomenon, by
which the real world is identied as a set of concepts. Shared means the notions are accepted
by a certain group as consensual knowledge [41] and [44]. In the following two important
aspects in dening dierent types of ontologies will be highlighted:
Explicit. Explicit means the meanings of the types of concepts that are used in the
conceptualisation and the constraints of their usage are dened [41] and [44].
Formal: Formal refers to the fact that the ontology is dened in an articial and well
dened language so that it is machine-readable [44]. Ontologies could be dened in
other way with respect to the degrees of being formal. An ontology could be dened
informal if it is written in natural language; semi-formal if it is expressed in a restricted
and structured form of natural language; formal, as it has been described; and rigorously
formal if they are dened in a language with formal semantics, theories and proofs of
properties such as soundness and completeness [44].
In a word, ontology could be dened explicit or non-explicit (implicit) and with dierent
Page 12 of 31
degrees of being formal and being shared. As adopted from Audi, formal explicit ontology is
dened as the study of explaining reality by breaking it down into concepts, relations and
rules, and then describe them formally and explicitly and share it with others. Usually an
ontology is composed of four components [3]:
1. Vocabulary (controlled vocabulary): a list of terms that have been enumerated explic-
itly [16]. All terms in the controlled vocabulary have an unambiguous, non-redundant
denition for a domain. For instance, the words building, storage, function are
dened as the vocabulary for a certain domain, which means these terms are understood
and shared within this domain. There is no need to further dene these terms.
2. Classes (concept): a set of objects and the basis of knowledge representation in an
ontology. It can represent every entity in the real world (a task, a function, a process,
an object). For instance, the class Warehouse is dened as the building whose
function is for storage.
3. Relations: represents types of interactions (is a, part of, lead by) between the classes
(concepts) in an ontology. For instance, the class Warehouse is related with the class
Goods by the relation stores, which means The warehouse stores goods.
4. Rules (axioms, or constraints): conditions that is always true for a domain. For in-
stance, the fact that a warehouse can be used as a shelter can be expressed in a rule
the function of a warehouse equals to the function of a shelter.
The distinction between Ontology modeling and OM (Object Modelling) is not that obvious.
And they could be replaced with each other to some extend. Since Ontology modeling
originates from knowledge representation and the object modeling has the root in information
engineering community [11], Ontology modeling are more concerned with what qualies a
being in the real world, while object modeling is more focused on what exists in the real
world.
It is necessary to point out that, in order to solve the semantic interoperability and allow
machine-automation of data integration, it is desired that the semantics of the data be dened
explicitly and represented in a machine-process-able way. Ontology can help model the
domain of interest. Explicit and formal ontolgies can help dene the semantics of the data,
make them sharable by dierent users and allow machine-processable. So when talking about
ontologies in the following sections, it is referring to explicit and formal ontologies.
2.3 Ontologies architectures
Three dierent approaches for using ontologies have been identied and a division has been
made into , a Single (global) ontology, Peer-to-peer (multiple) ontologies and Hybrid ontologies
in the following manner [48], [49] and [43]:
In a Single ontology, one global ontology is used to provide a shared vocabulary for
specifying the semantics. All information resources have to use this shared vocabulary
or a subset of it. As a consequence, all information sources have to share the basic
understanding of the given domain. Relations among dierent information sources can
be inferred automatically.
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Within this model, every domain concepts and relations are encoded. It provides a clear
and complete overview over this domain. It is possible to have such one, only when all
the dierent parties involved in the domain of interest have a common agreement over
the domain and no conicts within the domain. Otherwise it is hard to harmonize such
an ontology model.
Figure 2.2 a illustrates the idea. The SIMS project [2] is an example of this model,
where a global called SIMS model is built which includes a hierarchical terminological
knowledge base with nodes representing objects, actions and states. It also includes
indications of all relationships between the nodes. In the system, each resource is
simply related to the global domain ontology.
Peer-to-peer (multiple) ontologies are characterized by demanding a distinct ontology
for each service. These ontologies do not have a common base, so it is dicult to
compare two services to each other. The only way of solving this task is to explicitly
formalize cross-ontology mappings. Following this approach, all transformation rules
from one ontology to another need to be dened manually. As a result, the relations
between two services can be identied by considering the transformation rules between
their related ontologies.
Peer-to-peer ontologies make sure this is a mapping between any of the parties. And it is
easy for the domain ontology developer to build such ontologies, because the developer
only needs to consider the mapping between two parties. But the drawback is it results
in large amount of mappings n
2
2n (n is the number of the parties).
Figure 2.2 b illustrates this idea. Uitermark uses a peer-to-peer ontology to integrate
two topographic data sets, GBKN (large-scale topographic data set) and TOP10 Vector
(medium-scale topographic data set) [43].
Hybrid ontologies are developed to overcome the drawbacks of the previous two ap-
proaches (gure 2.2 c). Each service is referenced to a local ontology. But in order to
make them comparable, a shared vocabulary is used to build the local ontologies. The
shared vocabulary contains basic terms (primitives) of a domain.
The advantage of a hybrid ontology is that new sources can easily be added without
the need of modication. And it reduces the number of mappings from n
2
to n. The
hybrid ontology is adopted, since it more suits the situation of disaster management
dierent data are to integrated and dierent people from dierent hierarchical levels of
organisations are involved.
2.4 Approaches to create ontologies
Generally speaking, there are two approaches to build ontologies, namely, top-down approach
and bottom-up approach [1]. They both have their own pros and cons. The two approaches
will be compared in order to nd an approach of building the ontologies.
Top down ontologies development indicates an ontology is constructed by rst exam-
ining the domain of interest in general at a very abstract level and then rene our
constructing based on top levels concepts. This is accomplished by building an ab-
stract model of the domain of interest rst (or by starting from existing upper level
ontologies, which are explained in next paragraph) and then extending the model fur-
ther to map more specic concepts from low levels. For instance Kassel uses DOCLE
[25] as a starting point for elaborating new ontologies [18]. DOLCE is the Descriptive
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Figure 2.2: Dierent ontologies. The arrows indicate mapping rules among dierent ontolo-
gies. Figure adapted from [49]
Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering, aims at capturing the ontological
categories underlying natural language and human commonsense.
In Agrwals report, a upper ontology, a top-level ontology is an attempt to create an
ontology which describes very general concepts that are the same across all domains
[1]. Apart from DOCLE, there are many other top-level ontologies, for example SUMO
ontology (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology, a foundation ontology for a variety of
computer information processing systems) [30], CYC (a comprehensive ontology and
database of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applica-
tions to perform human-like reasoning) [40], Basic Formal Ontology (a ontology about
theory of part and hole, theory of dependence and theory of boundary, continuity and
contact) [36] and [37], and so on.
There is research carried out with respect to the usages of top-level ontologies. Probst
provides formal semantics for the central OM (a conceptual model and encoding for
observation and measurement) [6] terms by aligning them to the foundational ontology
DOLCE [32]. The alignment to a foundational ontology restricts the possible inter-
pretations of the central elements in the OM model and establishes explict relations
between categories of real world entities and classes of information objects. Stubkjaer
talks about the usability of CYC ontology for building cadastral application ontologies
[40]. Simth and Medo illustrates the usage of using BFO to build ontologies for bioin-
formatics and medicine [38] and [37]. How to adopt a foundation ontology based on
which to extend remains a question.
The resulting ontology from top down approach is a complete model over the domain of
interest. It contains all the relations between the concepts within the domain of interest.
It is also useful for other domain ontology developers, who can build their ontologies
based on this one (ontology extension in ontology construction), or map their ontologies
(ontology comparison in ontology usage) with this one.
When building such an ontology, there are some challenging issues to notice. Ontology
developers and domain experts need to cooperate and explore over the domain of in-
terest and then discover core concepts and relationships within this domain. However
it remains a problem for domain experts to reach an agreement over a domain, because
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it cannot be assumed that people look at the problem in one single way they might
have dierent tasks, rules(specication) and views over one problem. Second, it is dif-
cult to extent the top-level concepts with lower level data sources at the same time
maintaining the model integrity. Sometimes, the top-level structure through top-town
approach might be wrong and can not be extended to detailed levels. Building such an
ontology requires the ontology developers not only to have a thorough understanding
of the domain of interest in depth but also to have a clear overlook over the domain of
interest at wide breath.
Bottom up: Bottom up approach begins by looking at existing information sources
from low levels (data schema, data structure labels and etc.), developing ontologies for
specic individuals, and then combining them as a whole. The process starts from
the low-level information sources and moves towards a higher level of abstraction. The
result of this approach is an accurate model carrying mappings among all the individual
data sources with the domain of interest. For instance, the process of building an
(information exchange) core model for a domain usually takes this approach. A core
model, here we mean, a set of object model concepts that all domain members must
support.
When building such an ontology, too much attention is being paid to the details of the
information, such as the structures of the information, the implementation details of the
information. Many compromises are being made for information harmonisation, such
as the inconsistency, overlapping and presentation of the information. This ontology
could not be a complete model to represent the relationship of the domain of interest
because it is too focused on the information sources specications.
Bottom-up approach is usually used to rene ontologies, because sometimes core models
of dierent domains may not be consistent. We need to rene the ontology created
from the top-down approach using bottom-up approach. For example, a core model for
cadastral model (which is created using top-down approach and dened by bottom-up
approach, with respect to the cadastral domain) is given and a translator has been
made between this core model and two other dierent cadastral datasets [47] and [15].
On the other hand, since it focuses on the specications of the data sources, such
an ontology captures the relationship between the data sources well, such as the in-
consistencies, overlapping, disjointness, equivalence and so on. It works well for data
exchange.
The approach of building such an ontology does not require ontology developers to
have as thorough understanding of the domain of interest as the top down approach
demands. But instead it requires the ontology developers to be aware of the dierences
among dierent data sources. It is easier for ontology developer to start with by looking
at the data sources rst, because it does not require the ontology developers to have a
thorough overlook at the whole domain.
2.5 Ontologies for Disaster Management
Due to the characteristics of disaster management that dierent hierarchical levels of organ-
isations are cooperating, large amount of data from dierent places need to be integrated, as
well as dierent scales of details for information are required, we will adopt hybrid architec-
ture ontologies. In other words, desperate information will keep their own local ontologies
and a glue is going to be built that connects them without changing them.
In the following, some terms are introduced, such as data ontologies, ontology for pro-
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cesses, local ontologies, domain ontologies. These terms reect the fact that that there
are dierent ways to categorise ontologies. When local ontologies are used, it means this
is a particular ontology for one data source. For instance, a local ontology for TOP10NL
data set (a topographic data set), a local ontology for cadastral data set (a cadastral data
set). Data ontologies and ontology for processes are terms that are used to describe the
usage of the ontology. Data ontologies are used for describing the data while ontology for
processes are used to describe the processes in disaster management (the detailed descrip-
tions of the two can be found in the following paragraphs). Domain ontologies refers to
the whole set of ontologies that are developed for disaster management. It merges the data
ontologies and ontology for processes and encapsulate them as one.
Ontology for processes is the one that describes the processes in disaster management, which
can be considered as the work ows for disaster management how the disaster management
is organised, what are the responsibilities of each user, how the users communicate with each
other, which user participates in which process and which process needs what information.
We will examine through the processes (there 25 to 29 processes in the Netherlands) and
GRIP (GRIP 0 to GRIP 2) levels to work out what information is required by which user.
Data ontologies are a aggregation term, which consists of several ontologies that describe
the information sources seperately (e.g., topographic data sets, utility data sets, cadastre
data sets and so on) that are needed for disaster management. They are independent of the
domain of disaster management, because all these data sets could be used for other domains,
such as environmental domain, and water management domain. Data ontologies form the
foundation for information integration. In disaster management, there are plenty of data not
only from the existing databases (e.g., the plant information in gure 1.2) but also from the
eld (e.g., the measurement of the wind in gure 1.2) that need to be processed and combined
(e.g., the gasmal in gure 1.2). For each of these data, a local data ontology will be built
describing the content (and structure) of the data.
Generally speaking, ontologies for processes serve as the glue that integrates dierent data
sets together. It helps the disaster management to discover and combine desperate data sets.
Data ontologies specify what is included in the data source and how the relevant information
can be achieved. The ontology for processes together with data ontologies form the ontology
for disaster management.
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Chapter 3: PhD research
3.1 Research Problems
In order to make it short and obvious, it summarises the above sections and dene the main
questions of the PhD research as:
What is the added value of formal semantics for geo-information, compared with
current solutions (with knowledge hidden in the hard-codes or some models)?
How to apply formal semantics (in this case ontologies) in disaster management,
so that some man-made decision-making can be maximally supported by ma-
chines?
Under these research questions, many sub research questions can be dened.
1. Are there current tools sucient to describe the formal semantics of geo-information
for disaster management? Why it is needed to employ ontologies to describe the formal
semantics? Are current tools sucient to do data integration?
2. Are ontology languages more powerful than the commonly used modeling language, such
as UML. Since many of the previous works are made using UML, how to translate the
models in UML into one using ontologies languages, for instance, OWL (Web Ontology
Language) and RDF (Resources Descriptions Framework)? Are there any tools which
translate ontology models from one form to another (i.e., from UML to OWL)? For
instance, ODM (Ontology Denition Metamodel), which is an emerging standard from
the Object Management Group that supports ontology development and conceptual
modeling in several stand representation languages, an appropriate framework for
bridging between the knowledge representation (such as Ontology representation) and
the information system engineering communities (such as UML representation) [11]?
3. Is the current ontology modeling language sucient to model the decision-making pro-
cesses? What are the cons and pros of the existing modeling (ontology) language, for
instance, UML (plus OCL), RDF [24], the three series of OWL OWL Full, OWL DL
and OWL Lite [26], and so on. Is it necessary to include some logical programming or
logic languages, for instance, rst order logic, to help model the processes of decision
making?
4. Could be the represented knowledge interpreted to some logics, for instance Description
logics, so that some existing reasoners can be used to do reasoning with the represented
knowledge. Is it necessary to develop a specic reasoner for specic use or develop a
more general-purpose reasoner with more functionality.
5. How to start building such an ontology? either from the abstract level, from concrete
level or approach from both sides? The proposal aims at developing ontologies that are
both good for exchanging information and suitable exchanging domain knowledge.
6. Among dierent ontology architectures, such as hybrid architecture, peer to peer archi-
tecture, global architecture, select a suitable one for building the ontology for disaster
management.
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7. How to store the represented knowledge? Is it necessary to employ DBMS (database
management system), such as Oracle, for managing the represented knowledge? What
are the pros and cons if DBMS is employed to manage ontologies?
8. How to query the represented knowledge? If they are stored in a DBMS, is it possible
to do query using SQL or other query language, such as SPARQL.
3.2 Relations and roles with projects involved
The PhD research work is carried out between two projects, which provide relevant experi-
ences with the domain of disaster management and geo-information:
GDi4DM, Geographic Data infrastructure for Disaster Management, which aims at the
development of a Geographic Data Infrastructure to support decision-making and infor-
mation exchange during the disaster management phase to facilitate the interoperability
of emergency services and the quick and eective exchange of accurate information.
Humboldt, Development of a Framework for Data Harmonization and Service Integra-
tion. This project will contribute to the implementation of an European Spatial Data
Infrastructure (ESDI) that integrates all the diversity of spatial data available from the
multitude of European organisations.
The project GDi4DM and Humboldt are two use cases for the formal semantics of geo-
information. The former one aims at the interoperability of emergency services and quick
and eective exchange of accurate information for disaster management. The PhD research
will primarily based on the work of GDi4DM to examine the relations among dierent and
heterogeneous datasets, the complex communications among dierent users involved in disas-
ter management and the relations between the users and data. The result will be ontologies
for GDi4DM to support decision-making and automatic information exchange in the Nether-
lands.
Other projects, for instance, W3C geospatial Incubator [21], OpenKnowledge project [34],
Common Alert Protocol [17], FGDC Emergency Symbology, and European Mediterranean
Disaster Information Network (which has been mentioned in section 1.1) will closely be
followed. Some developments in practice will also be examined as an input for ontology
creation, for instance, US DHS [8], EU INSPIRE [31], FIG/ISO CCDM [47] and so on. All
the mentioned projects and models have relevance with respect to the PhD research to some
extend either at technical aspects and at the strategic aspects.
3.3 Research Methodology
The PhD research involves the work from theories to practice and back to theories again. So
the research will include works from theories studies to practice and back to theories research
and so forth. The following gives a summary of the methodology, which will be carried during
the PhD research.
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3.3.1 Literature Study
In order to avoid repetitive research work and get inspired by previous works, reading litera-
tures is not evitable for the PhD research. The works includes collecting related background
information for disaster management, collecting previous knowledge and works that have been
done to deal with disaster management, and understanding the normal procedures in case
of a disaster management. At the same time, from a technological point of view, collecting
knowledge that are related with technologies is also important.
Emphasis of this phase will be on semantic web technology, logic programming, modeling
theory, database technology together with policies and procedures of disaster management.
3.3.2 User Requirements Exploration
Since every technology should facilitate a group of users, the PhD research work should also
understand the target users people involved in disaster management. By understanding
the inner relations between dierent users and related datasets, it becomes clear what is going
on within the domain of disaster management.
The success of a technology product comes from an iterative cycle between understanding the
user requirements and the development of the product [39]. The PhD research will be based
on users requirement exploration. The user requirements that are collected within GDi4DM
will be used primarily.
3.3.3 Data used Examination
One of the PhD research works includes studying the data for disaster management. As it
has already been discussed that these data range from existing data maintained by dierent
organisations to operational data from the eld of a disaster.
With existing data, it refers to the general purpose data and specic data. For instance,
overview maps of Netherlands (overzichtskaart Nederland) with the scale of 1:1,000,000, to-
pographic maps (Top-10 Vector, Top-25 Raster and Top-250 Raster), Cadastral maps, air
photography, GBKN (large-scale maps of Netherlands with the scale of 1:1,000), current alti-
tude data of Netherlands (Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland), are all general purpose data.
Cabel and piping, statistic data agrarian comit, plot and plant information, roads, water
ways, track ways, station allocation, ports, shipping routes, shipping movements, airports,
ight routes, dangerous-substance allocation and so on are examples of specic data.
With respect to operational data, the digital forms of them are not available, such as dynamic
data coming from the measurements, reports and etc. from the eld. Some of these are not
available at the moment, but they will be obtained from the work of GDi4DM.
3.3.4 Developments Building Ontologies
As explained in previous section, the hybrid ontologies architecture will be adopted, which will
result in several ontologies. The data that are needed for disaster management can exist with
or without (these data are referred to as existing data, section 1.3.2) the context of disaster
management. For instance, the road maps can be used for route planning during disaster
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management as well as for urban designing; the basic registry database that is maintained by
the municipalities can be used to manage population during the disaster managements. Thus
it helps allow more interoperability by building ontologies for the data, which is independent
on the context. Bearing this idea in mind, the data that are needed for disaster management,
e.g. GBKN, TOP10NL, basic registry database and so on, will be examined and ontologies,
which are independent on the context, will be developed separately.
The ontology for processes will be developed according to the users requirement for the dis-
aster management. The users requirement describes the work ow of disaster management
which actions should be activated if an incident happens, which actors should get involved,
which information should be collected, what are the relations among dierent emergency of-
cers, etc. During the disaster management, a large amount of data (these data are referred
to as operational data, section 1.3.2) will be created as well, e.g. the measurement of air
pollute, the report of victims. These data are dependent on the context of disaster manage-
ment. Thus the when the development of ontology for processes nishes, the ontology for the
operational data which are created during disaster management will be developed too.
Having the ontology for processes and data (existing and operational) ontologies ready, an
ontology for disaster management will be developed. This is one of the nal goals for this
PhD research (as well as testing the usage of the ontology). The ontologies will integrate
the ontology for processes and data ontologies, which describes the terms, concepts (users,
geographic objects) and relations (work ows, data) for disaster management.
3.3.5 Developments Building a prototype
The research problem originates from real world problems and we are seeking a solution for
that. Thats why tests will also be essential in this PhD research.
The hypothesis of the result of PhD research will be a system, which allows the machine
automation of the discovery and integration of geo-information for disaster management.
Formal semantics of geo-information for disaster management will be described and a series
of ontologies (or shemas) will be developed for the management work of disaster management.
The nal demo will consist of several components web services, ontologies, a reasoner, a
user interface, a virtual database which consists of several real databases. A user interface
is provided with the user to input their request and output the result of their request. The
reasoner together with ontologies connects several database as a virtual database and presents
the result to the user. So it seems to the user that, he/she is communicating with one instead
of several databases.
3.3.6 Cooperation
The PhD research is such one that covers many other research elds, for instance, knowledge
engineering, geomatics, disaster management and so on. So collaborations will be established
with related research organisations, companies and persons. For instance, a cooperation with
the University of Free Amsterdam.
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3.4 Topics beyond the PhD research
As the topics of the PhD research covers many research areas, there are many problems
existing or related with the PhD research. It will point out some of them in the following
but they are beyond the PhD research.
Distributed environments. In this PhD research, it is assumed that the data is stored
in one place and full access to all the data are granted to the users. However in real
situation, the data are distributed at dierent places and users do not have the same
access to the data. In this PhD project, it only concerns which user get what data
through dierent combinations of processes and GRIP (only GRIP level 1 and GRIP
level 2 will be considered).
3D model. Even through the 3D model is a hot topics and 3D model data are useful
for disaster management, it is not going to be used for the PhD research.
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Chapter 4: Research Plan
Since the PhD research is related to the project (GDi4DM and Humboldt) development
progress and several other activities (for instance, the education), the following schedule is
only a rough one, which indicates the time consumption on the research work of PhD. The
PhD research ocially started on September 1st, 2006.
As other common PhD plans, 70% of the total time will be made available and spent on the
PhD research work, 5% of the total time will be spent on writing paper and reports, and
the other 25% will be used for other issues, for instance, attending educations, conferences,
meetings, other research projects, supervising students and so on. The overall plan is as
following:
The last four months (September, October, November and December) in 2006 and the
rst month (January) in 2007 will be spent on background literature studies and the
writing the PhD proposal.
Starting from February 2007, untill 2009 (also the rst one or two months) will be the
main period for conducting the PhD research (3 years in total). See gure 4.1 and
section 4.1 as details.
2007 (1 months) Writing research plan (part 2) 1 month.
2010 The last six months will be spent on the writing of doctoral dissertation and
preparation of defending ceremony.
During the research period, a plan for visiting other universities or research institutes
is considered. The total amount of time will not exceed 4 months.
At the same time, this is a publication goal together with the PhD research:
Each year a progress report will be made for GDI4DM (and or for Humbolt).
Each year two conference papers are planned for submissions regarding disaster man-
agement and semantic web conferences.
4.1 PhD research agenda
1. Preparation.
Literature Study. This phase is the preparation phase for the PhD research, which
includes: i) understanding the background of the PhD research disaster manage-
ment; ii) reading and comparing of past or on-going projects related with disaster
management and so on. This takes about four months from September, 2006
to December, 2006.
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Writing of PhD proposal. The whole month of January and February in 2007 will
be spent on the writing of PhD proposal. Starting by writing a draft version and
get feedback from the supervisors. The result will be an ocial PhD proposal and
published as a section report.
Software preparation. The whole month of April in 2007 will be spent on collect-
ing technical information and selecting proper softwares for the following work,
for instance, semantic web technology, ontology technology, tools for developing
ontologies and so on.
2. Local data ontologies building.
Local ontologies building for ED (existing data). Study related existing geo-
information data needed for disaster management response, examine detailed de-
scriptions (or schema) of dierent data-sets, and build local ontologies for these
data sets. The result will be helpful for nding their relations, such as overlapping,
dependency, inconsistencies and so on. The result will be local ontologies for each
data sets.
Local ontologies building for OD (operational data). Study related operational
data needed for disaster management response. Understand their roles in the
management work of disaster response. Build local ontologies for operational data
will be helpful in nding their relations, such as overlapping, dependency, incon-
sistencies and so on. The result will be local ontologies for the operational data
for disaster management.
3. Ontologies (Vocabularies) building.
Ontologies building for ED (existing data). When the existing data (local ontolo-
gies) are ready for integration, we will building ontologies for the existing data
so that they are comparable with each other. The ontologies serve as the glue
that combines existing data sets together. The result will be ontologies (or shared
vocabularies) for the existing data.
Ontologies building for ExOp data (Existing data and Operational data). In order
to combine the existing data and operational data together for disaster manage-
ment, we need a glue to connect them together. That glue is the ontologies
for existing data and operational data. The result will be ontologies (shared vo-
cabularies) for existing data and operational data.
Build the ontology for processes in DM (disaster management). The targeted
benefactors of the PhD research are those who involved in disaster management.
Understanding their requirements plays an vital role in the PhD research. This
step includes visits to dierent departments, for instance, the Fire Brigade, the
Police, the Municipality, some other mapping agencies and so on. Understand
their main role and their relations when they cooperate to deal with disasters.
By examining the processes in disaster management, the inner-relations and inter-
relations among dierent users from dierent organisations will be examined. And
the result will be an ontology for processes in disaster management.
Domain ontologies building. When both the ontology for processes has been de-
veloped and all the data (integration of existing and operational data) need for
disaster management have been made ready, the whole picture of disaster manage-
ment will become clear. This step we will mainly put our focus on the integration
of the ontologies for processes and the data. The result will be a complete ontology
for the domain of disaster management.
4. Implementation and test of ontologies and modications of ontologies.
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Implementation tools and architecture selection. At this stage, comparisons will
rst be made on dierent ontology representation languages, such as, DAMO+OIL,
RDF, OWL ( includes OWL Full, OWL Lite, OWL DL and OWL-S) and WSDL, to
choose the best one (or several) to represent the ontologies in machine-processable
language. Second, dierent existing environment will be compared, such as Protege,
WSMO studio [9], to implement the ontologies. After that, we will examine the
existing knowledge reasoners, for instance MORE (Multi-version Ontology REa-
soner), RacerPro, WSDL reasoner and so on, to see if they are suitable for the use
of the PhD project.
Implementation test of ontologies for ED (existing data) integration. After having
the vocabulary (ontologies) for existing data, we will implement the ontologies for
ED and carry out a test to see if the vocabulary (ontologies) works well for the
integration of the existing data. Modication will be made according to the result
of the test.
Implementation and test of ontologies for ExOp data (existing and operational
data). We will implement the ontologies for ExOp and carry out a test to see
if the vocabulary (ontologies) works well for the integration of existing data and
operational data. Modication will be made on the vocabulary (ontologies) for
existing data and operational data according to the result of the test.
Implementation and test of domain ontologies prototyping. The result of the
previous step will be a series of queries. The queries will be used to test the domain
ontologies application. An evaluation of the domain ontologies application will be
made according to the evaluating criteria. Modication of domain ontologies.
According to the result of the test, a modication will be made on the domain
ontologies.
5. Evaluation of this project. Compare the results from the demos and prototypes that
have been built using the ontologies with the current solutions that are used without
ontologies. Find out the added value of formal semantics. (This process will carried
out together with the previous process implementation and test of ontologies and
modications of ontologies).
6. Final demo building.
Scenario and criteria selection. This step selects a scenario from disaster man-
agement. A set of queries will be selected from disaster management to show
the use of the system. And a set of evaluation criteria, such as the robustness,
the time-consumption and etc., will be chosen to evaluate the use of the domain
ontologies. The result will be a set of queries and evaluation criteria for test the
domain ontologies application. This scenario will be use primarily for GDi4DM
and HUMBOLDT (perhaps others).
Prototyping of domain ontologies. A web services that uses ontologies will be
made available to provide dierent services, such as format conversion, schema
mapping, ontologies access, thesaurus access, knowledge service, query mediation
and so on. A prototype application combining and using the service will be carried
out between the users and the data to show the use of the domain ontologies.
The result is an application (system) using the domain ontologies to facilitate the
discovery of data. The scenario and criteria selection will be used to demonstrate
the use of the system.
7. Final preparation.
Final release of domain ontologies. At this step, a nal work will be made on the
release of the domain ontologies for disaster management. And evaluation of the
added values of formal semantics will be made.
Page 25 of 31
Figure 4.1: Phd Plan
Final preparation. At this stage, the PhD research is nished. And this is the last
stage for the preparation of the writing of PhD thesis.
Thesis writing. The last period of PhD research will be mainly spent on the writing
of the PhD thesis. And after the submission of the PhD thesis, one or two months
will be spent on writing other articles (this depends on the time and other factors).
8. Other issues.
Writing of paper and chapters of PhD thesis will be carried out as the research pro-
gresses. And attendance of education and conference will be carried out during the
research period.
The above is a list of research agenda. And the time for writing paper and reports, visits to
related institutes, universities and organisations, and attending education and conferences is
also included (but not specied). All these mentioned activities depend on the relevance and
the time related to the research.
4.2 Organisation Issues
1. Planned meeting with supervisors. Three scientic stas are involved in the supervision
work of the PhD research a daily supervisor Sisi Zlatanova, a technical supervisor
Marian de Vries and the promotor Peter van Oosterom. As it is important and helpful
to track the work of the PhD research, a planned meeting agenda with supervisors is
proposed and notes at meeting will also be made.
Once (or twice) per week meeting with Sisi Zlatanova to discuss the detailed issues
on disaster management.
Once per two weeks meeting with Marian de Vries to discuss the technical issues
of building ontologies and semantic technologies (esp. in the rst year).
Page 26 of 31
Once per month meeting with all the supervisors to report the process of PhD
research.
2. Planned conferences. In order to get to know the start-of-the-art advancements and
show the achievements of the PhD research, an agenda to attend several conferences is
also planned, which includes (this is not a exhaustive list of all planned conferences):
Gi4DM (website: http://commission4.1uphost.net/gi4dm.html), to use the
latest state-of-the-art space-based geomatics technologies to understand the dy-
namic earth processes and geo-hazards (in the year of 2007 and 2008).
ISCRAM (website: http://www.iscram.org/), an international community on
information systems for crisis response and management (in the year of 2008 or
2009).
SebGIS (website: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/), Semantic-based Ge-
ographical Information Systems, aims at discussing views on how to integrate
semantics into current geographic information systems, and how this will benet
the end users.
AGILE (website: http://www.agile-online.org/), promotes academic teach-
ing and research on Geographic Information Science by representing the interests
of those involved in GI-teaching and research at the national and the European
level, and the continuation and extension of existing networking activities (in the
year of 2007 or 2008).
SDH (website: http://www.igugis.org/conference.htm), Spatial Data Han-
dling. The International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH) is the pre-
mier long-running forum in geographical information science, providing a presti-
gious outlet to geographers, cartographers, computer scientists and others in this
rapidly developing multidisciplinary area.
ISWC (website: http://iswc.semanticweb.org/). The International Semantic
Web Conference is a major international forum at which research on all aspects of
the Semantic Web is presented.
TIEMS (website: http://www.tiems.org/index.php), an non-prot society in-
forms and educates the public in all areas of emergency management, publishes
periodicals, sponsors networking events (in the year of 2008 or 2009).
ISPRS (website: http://www.isprs.org/), International Society for Photogram-
metry and Remote Sensing. It is an international NGO devoted to the develop-
ment of the international cooperation for the advancement of knowledge research,
development and education in the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial
Information Sciences, to contribute to the well being of humanity and sustainabil-
ity environment (in the year of 2008 or 2009).
UDMS, Urban Data Management Society (website: http://www.udms.net/), or-
ganizes international symposia at various locations in Europe in order to promote
the development of information systems in local government (in the year of 2008
or 2009).
COSIT, Conference On Spatial Information Theory
All the planned conferences are not limited to the above list, some other conferences
related with geo-information, disaster management and semantic web will also be at-
tended considering the relevance and time w.r.t. the PhD research.
3. Planned educations. An education agenda for PhD research is also made, which includes
(but not limited to):
Attendance of PhD schools, for instance VESPUCCI (summer institute on Geo-
graphic Information Science).
Page 27 of 31
Lectures on ontologies and semantic web (Ontology engineering) in Free University
of Amsterdam and lectures on GIS (such as, Geo Database Management Systems,
Geo Information Infrastructure Technology and so on) in Delft University of Tech-
nology.
Some on-line courses are also included, for instance, Semantics and Ontologies in
Geographic Information Services from the Technical University of Vienna.
4. Planned visits to other universities, institutes, or organisations. In order to get cut-
the-edge technologies and research results, a planned visiting is also considered, which
includes (but not limited to):
Universities and other research institutes, for instance the Free University of Am-
sterdam, which specializes in ontologies, ITC (International Institute for Geo-
information Science and Earth Observation), whose knowledge eld is geo-information
science, earth observation and natural hazards.
Organisations. Since the PhD research needs much expertise in some certain
areas, visits to some specialized organisations will help and advance the research,
for instance, the re brigade department, the police department, some mapping
agencies and so on.
Companies. Some world leading companies are also busy the development of
Semantic (Ontologies) technologies, such as Oracle. The GDI4DM project has
cooperations with Geodan (website: http://www.geodan.nl/) and Nieuwland
(website: http://www.nieuwland.nl/). Visits to these companies will also help
the advancement of PhD research.
5. Planned Publications. A planned publications agenda is listed as follows (but not
limited to):
Reports. This includes reports on the projects (GDI4DM and Humboldt), the
progress, the development explanation and project results.
Papers. This includes paper submitted to workshops, symposiums and conferences.
Each year two or three paper will be submitted to those mentioned events as
specied above.
Journals. One or two journals in total in the four years of the PhD research.
Page 28 of 31
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Reports published before in this series:

1. GISt Report No. 1, Oosterom, P.J. van, Research issues in integrated querying of geometric and thematic
cadastral information (1), Delft University of Technology, Rapport aan Concernstaf Kadaster, Delft 2000,
29 p.p.
2. GISt Report No. 2, Stoter, J.E., Considerations for a 3D Cadastre, Delft University of Technology, Rapport
aan Concernstaf Kadaster, Delft 2000, 30.p.
3. GISt Report No. 3, Fendel, E.M. en A.B. Smits (eds.), Java GIS Seminar, Opening GDMC, Delft 15
November 2000, Delft University of Technology, GISt. No. 3, 25 p.p.
4. GISt Report No. 4, Oosterom, P.J.M. van, Research issues in integrated querying of geometric and
thematic cadastral information (2), Delft University of Technology, Rapport aan Concernstaf Kadaster,
Delft 2000, 29 p.p.
5. GISt Report No. 5, Oosterom, P.J.M. van, C.W. Quak, J.E. Stoter, T.P.M. Tijssen en M.E. de Vries,
Objectgerichtheid TOP10vector: Achtergrond en commentaar op de gebruikersspecificaties en het
conceptuele gegevensmodel, Rapport aan Topografische Dienst Nederland, E.M. Fendel (eds.), Delft
University of Technology, Delft 2000, 18 p.p.
6. GISt Report No. 6, Quak, C.W., An implementation of a classification algorithm for houses, Rapport aan
Concernstaf Kadaster, Delft 2001, 13.p.
7. GISt Report No. 7, Tijssen, T.P.M., C.W. Quak and P.J.M. van Oosterom, Spatial DBMS testing with data
from the Cadastre and TNO NITG, Delft 2001, 119 p.
8. GISt Report No. 8, Vries, M.E. de en E. Verbree, Internet GIS met ArcIMS, Delft 2001, 38 p.
9. GISt Report No. 9, Vries, M.E. de, T.P.M. Tijssen, J.E. Stoter, C.W. Quak and P.J.M. van Oosterom, The
GML prototype of the new TOP10vector object model, Report for the Topographic Service, Delft 2001, 132
p.
10. GISt Report No. 10, Stoter, J.E., Nauwkeurig bepalen van grondverzet op basis van CAD
ontgravingsprofielen en GIS, een haalbaarheidsstudie, Rapport aan de Bouwdienst van Rijkswaterstaat,
Delft 2001, 23 p.
11. GISt Report No. 11, Geo DBMS, De basis van GIS-toepassingen, KvAG/AGGN Themamiddag, 14 november
2001, J. Flim (eds.), Delft 2001, 37 p.
12. GISt Report No. 12, Vries, M.E. de, T.P.M. Tijssen, J.E. Stoter, C.W. Quak and P.J.M. van Oosterom, The
second GML prototype of the new TOP10vector object model, Report for the Topographic Service, Delft
2002, Part 1, Main text, 63 p. and Part 2, Appendices B and C, 85 p.
13. GISt Report No. 13, Vries, M.E. de, T.P.M. Tijssen en P.J.M. van Oosterom, Comparing the storage of Shell
data in Oracle spatial and in Oracle/ArcSDE compressed binary format, Delft 2002, .72 p. (Confidential)
14. GISt Report No. 14, Stoter, J.E., 3D Cadastre, Progress Report, Report to Concernstaf Kadaster, Delft 2002,
16 p.
15. GISt Report No. 15, Zlatanova, S., Research Project on the Usability of Oracle Spatial within the RWS
Organisation, Detailed Project Plan (MD-NR. 3215), Report to Meetkundige Dienst Rijkswaterstaat, Delft
2002, 13 p.
16. GISt Report No. 16, Verbree, E., Driedimensionale Topografische Terreinmodellering op basis van
Tetrader Netwerken: Top10-3D, Report aan Topografische Dienst Nederland, Delft 2002, 15 p.
17. GISt Report No. 17, Zlatanova, S. Augmented Reality Technology, Report to SURFnet bv, Delft 2002, 72 p.
18. GISt Report No. 18, Vries, M.E. de, Ontsluiting van Geo-informatie via netwerken, Plan van aanpak, Delft
2002, 17p.
19. GISt Report No. 19, Tijssen, T.P.M., Testing Informix DBMS with spatial data from the cadastre, Delft 2002,
62 p.
20. GISt Report No. 20, Oosterom, P.J.M. van, Vision for the next decade of GIS technology, A research
agenda for the TU Delft the Netherlands, Delft 2003, 55 p.
21. GISt Report No. 21, Zlatanova, S., T.P.M. Tijssen, P.J.M. van Oosterom and C.W. Quak, Research on
usability of Oracle Spatial within the RWS organisation, (AGI-GAG-2003-21), Report to Meetkundige Dienst
Rijkswaterstaat, Delft 2003, 74 p.
22. GISt Report No. 22, Verbree, E., Kartografische hoogtevoorstelling TOP10vector, Report aan
Topografische Dienst Nederland, Delft 2003, 28 p.
23. GISt Report No. 23, Tijssen, T.P.M., M.E. de Vries and P.J.M. van Oosterom, Comparing the storage of
Shell data in Oracle SDO_Geometry version 9i and version 10g Beta 2 (in the context of ArcGIS 8.3), Delft
2003, 20 p. (Confidential)
24. GISt Report No. 24, Stoter, J.E., 3D aspects of property transactions: Comparison of registration of 3D
properties in the Netherlands and Denmark, Report on the short-term scientific mission in the CIST G9
framework at the Department of Development and Planning, Center of 3D geo-information, Aalborg,
Denmark, Delft 2003, 22 p.
25. GISt Report No. 25, Verbree, E., Comparison Gridding with ArcGIS 8.2 versus CPS/3, Report to Shell
International Exploration and Production B.V., Delft 2004, 14 p. (confidential).
26. GISt Report No. 26, Penninga, F., Oracle 10g Topology, Testing Oracle 10g Topology with cadastral data,
Delft 2004, 48 p.
27. GISt Report No. 27, Penninga, F., 3D Topography, Realization of a three dimensional topographic terrain
representation in a feature-based integrated TIN/TEN model, Delft 2004, 27 p.
28. GISt Report No. 28, Penninga, F., Kartografische hoogtevoorstelling binnen TOP10NL, Inventarisatie
mogelijkheden op basis van TOP10NL uitgebreid met een Digitaal Hoogtemodel, Delft 2004, 29 p.
29. GISt Report No. 29, Verbree, E. en S.Zlatanova, 3D-Modeling with respect to boundary representations
within geo-DBMS, Delft 2004, 30 p.
30. GISt Report No. 30, Penninga, F., Introductie van de 3e dimensie in de TOP10NL; Voorstel voor een
onderzoekstraject naar het stapsgewijs introduceren van 3D data in de TOP10NL, Delft 2005, 25 p.
31. GISt Report No. 31, P. van Asperen, M. Grothe, S. Zlatanova, M. de Vries, T. Tijssen, P. van Oosterom and
A. Kabamba, Specificatie datamodel Beheerkaart Nat, RWS-AGI report/GIST Report, Delft, 2005, 130 p.
32. GISt Report No. 32, E.M. Fendel, Looking back at Gi4DM, Delft 2005, 22 p.
33. GISt Report No. 33, P. van Oosterom, T. Tijssen and F. Penninga, Topology Storage and the Use in the
context of consistent data management, Delft 2005, 35 p.
34. GISt Report No. 34, E. Verbree en F. Penninga, RGI 3D Topo - DP 1-1, Inventarisatie huidige
toegankelijkheid, gebruik en mogelijke toepassingen 3D topografische informatie en systemen, 3D Topo
Report No. RGI-011-01/GISt Report No. 34, Delft 2005, 29 p.
35. GISt Report No. 35, E. Verbree, F. Penninga en S. Zlatanova, Datamodellering en datastructurering voor
3D topografie, 3D Topo Report No. RGI-011-02/GISt Report No. 35, Delft 2005, 44 p.
36. GISt Report No. 36, W. Looijen, M. Uitentuis en P. Bange, RGI-026: LBS-24-7, Tussenrapportage DP-1:
Gebruikerswensen LBS onder redactie van E. Verbree en E. Fendel, RGI LBS-026-01/GISt Rapport No. 36,
Delft 2005, 21 p.
37. GISt Report No. 37, C. van Strien, W. Looijen, P. Bange, A. Wilcsinszky, J. Steenbruggen en E. Verbree,
RGI-026: LBS-24-7, Tussenrapportage DP-2: Inventarisatie geo-informatie en -services onder redactie van
E. Verbree en E. Fendel, RGI LBS-026-02/GISt Rapport No. 37, Delft 2005, 21 p.
38. GISt Report No. 38, E. Verbree, S. Zlatanova en E. Wisse, RGI-026: LBS-24-7, Tussenrapportage DP-3:
Specifieke wensen en eisen op het gebied van plaatsbepaling, privacy en beeldvorming, onder redactie
van E. Verbree en E. Fendel, RGI LBS-026-03/GISt Rapport No. 38, Delft 2005, 15 p.
39. GISt Report No. 39, E. Verbree, E. Fendel, M. Uitentuis, P. Bange, W. Looijen, C. van Strien, E. Wisse en A.
Wilcsinszky en E. Verbree, RGI-026: LBS-24-7, Eindrapportage DP-4: Workshop 28-07-2005 Geo-
informatie voor politie, brandweer en hulpverlening ter plaatse, RGI LBS-026-04/GISt Rapport No. 39,
Delft 2005, 18 p.
40. GISt Report No. 40, P.J.M. van Oosterom, F. Penninga and M.E. de Vries, Trendrapport GIS, GISt Report
No. 40 / RWS Report AGI-2005-GAB-01, Delft, 2005, 48 p.
41. GISt Report No. 41, R. Thompson, Proof of Assertions in the Investigation of the Regular Polytope, GISt
Report No. 41 / NRM-ISS090, Delft, 2005, 44 p.
42. GISt Report No. 42, F. Penninga and P. van Oosterom, Kabel- en leidingnetwerken in de kadastrale
registratie (in Dutch) GISt Report No. 42, Delft, 2006, 38 p.
43. GISt Report No. 43, F. Penninga and P.J.M. van Oosterom, Editing Features in a TEN-based DBMS
approach for 3D Topographic Data Modelling, Technical Report, Delft, 2006, 21 p.
44. GISt Report No. 44, M.E. de Vries, Open source clients voor UMN MapServer: PHP/Mapscript, JavaScript,
Flash of Google (in Dutch), Delft, 2007, 13 p.
45. GISt Report No. 45, W. Tegtmeier, Harmonization of geo-information related to the lifecycle of civil
engineering objects with focus on uncertainty and quality of surveyed data and derived real world
representations, Delft, 2007, 40 p.