Ontology Construction and Schema Merging Using an Application-Independent Ontology for Humanitarian Aid in Disaster Management
Ontology Construction and Schema Merging Using an Application-Independent Ontology for Humanitarian Aid in Disaster Management
Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Pasinee Apisakmontri1,3(B), Ekawit Nantajeewarawat1, Marut Buranarach2, and Mitsuru Ikeda3
Abstract. Humanitarian aid information, e.g., information on the occurrences
of disaster situations, victims, shelters, resources, and facilities, is
usually rapidly dynamic, ambiguous, and huge. A system of humanitarian
aid often involves data items frommultidisciplinary environments, some of
which have similar meanings but appear structurally different
in various data sources. To achieve semantic interoperability among
humanitarian aid information systems to be exchanged meaningful information,
this paper contributes a methodology for construction of an
application-independent ontology and proposes a guideline for merging
information from different databases through the application-independent
ontology that helps people to integrate systems with minimal modification.
We demonstrate how to develop an ontology for Humanitarian Aid
for Refugee in Emergencies (HARE) as a common ontology for sharing and
re-use the current knowledge bases. We discuss an approach to merging
Relational Databases (RDBs) to heterogeneous hierarchical ontology.
Keywords: Interoperability · Ontology construction · Merging
resources · Humanitarian aid · Disaster management
Introduction
The frequency and severity of disasters have increased noticeably all over the
world, causing impacts on societies, national economics, and environment. When
a natural or human-made disaster occurs, a large amount of information is spread
over, necessitating development of supporting information systems. A disaster
management system is usually developed by many experts having a variety of
backgrounds. Success of disaster information management depends on finding
and effectively integrating related information to take decisions during information
distribution [23], with the primary aim of getting the right resources to the
right places at the right time and providing the right information to the right
people to make the right decisions at the right levels at the right time.
Combining information from various sources is often problematic due to difficulties
arising from interoperabilities of three basic types, i.e., system, syntax, and
semantic interoperability. Interoperability at the system and syntax levels can be
achieved by hardware improvement and a syntax standard, respectively. Semantic
interoperability is more problematic. The use of different terms with different
background knowledge causes confusion in the specification of semantics
Ontology Construction and Merging Resources
Strategy for Building Ontologies
– Application-dependent: the ontology is built based on an application knowledge
base by a process of abstraction.
– Application-semi dependent: possible scenarios of ontology use are identified
in the specification stage.
Application-independent: the process is totally independent of the uses to
which the ontology will be put in knowledge-based systems, agents, etc.
When establishing semantic interoperability of heterogeneous data, constructing
the underlying ontology is a crucial part. Several publications about ontological
development methodologies have been published, but still lack of widely accepted
methodologies. The main reason is that mostly methodologies design for a particular
project [9]. Our approach adopts the Uschold and King method [21], which a
framework for enterprise modeling, to be a guideline. In highly dynamic environment,
like a disaster management, to find a satisfactory mapping of Relational
Databases (RDBs) onto a global model is a huge problem. The task of integrating
heterogeneous information sources has several approaches. We consider
a semantic mapping between an application-independent ontology and RDBs.
Objectives and Organization
Semantic Interoperability is challenging. If information systems are integrated
with a common ontology, they will share a familiar underlying structure and then
knowledge can be more easily shared. Our research explores the semantic interoperability
on humanitarian aid and proposes a methodology for heterogeneous
systems to be more readily shared with other different databases. An applicationindependence
ontology in the humanitarian aid domain acts as a link between
any data sources in the domain. We develop an application-independence common
ontology for Humanitarian Aid for Refugee in Emergencies (HARE) that it
can support interoperation among heterogeneous systems and provide the guideline
for semantic interoperability among existing RDB of humanitarian aid in
emergencies systems. The paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 provides background and related works. Section 3 describes our
ontology development methodology. Section 4 and 5 describe how HARE ontology
can be used to merging RDBs and explain the correspondence analysis
among existing disaster management systems through HARE ontology. Section
6 concludes the paper.
Background
Semantic Interoperability Through Ontologies
A survey in [8] reported that ontologies and current technologies could be used
to identify and associate semantically corresponding concepts in related disaster
information in order that heterogeneous data can be integrated. An ontology
is a conceptualization of data domain. It provides formal explicit definitions of
concepts (known as classes), properties (known as attributes) describing various
features of the concepts, restrictions on these properties and well-defined
relationships between concepts. The target of ontology in Information Science is
to define a common vocabulary for knowledge representation and specifies constraints
on the relationships between objects in an application domain. The basis
of an ontology can cope with the confusion and better enabling computers and
people to work in cooperation [3,12,23]. Because of the potential of an ontology,
one data source can be combined with another. Semantic interoperability allows
the applications to cooperate with minimal modifications [13]. Thus, the need
for ontologies to establish a common specification to deal with the entire disaster
management cycle is necessary.
Related Works
Ontology has been used in several ways of the disaster management. [10] is
finding suitable information in the open and distributed environment of current
geographic information web services in order to overcome semantic heterogeneity
during a keyword-based search. The strategy they used for building ontology is an
application-semi dependent ontology. [19] models the conceptual ontologies that
use the application-independent ontology strategy and this paper proposes service
for disaster querying system. [11] proposes a practical emergency response
ontology for collaborative crisis information management systems by using the
application-dependent ontology strategy. [24] constructs emergency ontology by
using the application-independent ontology strategy to support decision-making
directly from the emergency documentation. [14] proposes an emergency ontology
model using a hierarchical architecture, including upper ontology and application
ontology by using the application-independent ontology strategy.
Ontology has been applied in many research areas. The above researches
relate to ontology construction in different strategy. The ontology construction
without an application-dependence, which is necessary for the common ontology
construction, and the mapping between OWL and Relational Databases are
challenging.
Construction of the HARE Ontology
The construction of the HARE ontology reflects the need to design a global
ontology-based approach which is capable of dealing with an RDB. Our approach
to ontology construction has been started with information exploring from
a knowledge based of UNHCR handbook[2,15,16], which [15] contains 27 chapters
of a standard knowledge of international organization in 576 pages, [16]
contains 25 chapters in 325 pages, and [2] contains six chapters in 77 pages.
Humanitarian aid in emergencies is part of a complex system in which different
organization processes collaborate in sharing information on refugee’s profiles,
donations, rescue activities, and actors. The establishment of an ontology for the
HARE domain is a pre-requisite to developing an application.
Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Pasinee Apisakmontri1,3(B), Ekawit Nantajeewarawat1, Marut Buranarach2, and Mitsuru Ikeda3
Abstract. Humanitarian aid information, e.g., information on the occurrences
of disaster situations, victims, shelters, resources, and facilities, is
usually rapidly dynamic, ambiguous, and huge. A system of humanitarian
aid often involves data items frommultidisciplinary environments, some of
which have similar meanings but appear structurally different
in various data sources. To achieve semantic interoperability among
humanitarian aid information systems to be exchanged meaningful information,
this paper contributes a methodology for construction of an
application-independent ontology and proposes a guideline for merging
information from different databases through the application-independent
ontology that helps people to integrate systems with minimal modification.
We demonstrate how to develop an ontology for Humanitarian Aid
for Refugee in Emergencies (HARE) as a common ontology for sharing and
re-use the current knowledge bases. We discuss an approach to merging
Relational Databases (RDBs) to heterogeneous hierarchical ontology.
Keywords: Interoperability · Ontology construction · Merging
resources · Humanitarian aid · Disaster management
Introduction
The frequency and severity of disasters have increased noticeably all over the
world, causing impacts on societies, national economics, and environment. When
a natural or human-made disaster occurs, a large amount of information is spread
over, necessitating development of supporting information systems. A disaster
management system is usually developed by many experts having a variety of
backgrounds. Success of disaster information management depends on finding
and effectively integrating related information to take decisions during information
distribution [23], with the primary aim of getting the right resources to the
right places at the right time and providing the right information to the right
people to make the right decisions at the right levels at the right time.
Combining information from various sources is often problematic due to difficulties
arising from interoperabilities of three basic types, i.e., system, syntax, and
semantic interoperability. Interoperability at the system and syntax levels can be
achieved by hardware improvement and a syntax standard, respectively. Semantic
interoperability is more problematic. The use of different terms with different
background knowledge causes confusion in the specification of semantics
Ontology Construction and Merging Resources
Strategy for Building Ontologies
– Application-dependent: the ontology is built based on an application knowledge
base by a process of abstraction.
– Application-semi dependent: possible scenarios of ontology use are identified
in the specification stage.
Application-independent: the process is totally independent of the uses to
which the ontology will be put in knowledge-based systems, agents, etc.
When establishing semantic interoperability of heterogeneous data, constructing
the underlying ontology is a crucial part. Several publications about ontological
development methodologies have been published, but still lack of widely accepted
methodologies. The main reason is that mostly methodologies design for a particular
project [9]. Our approach adopts the Uschold and King method [21], which a
framework for enterprise modeling, to be a guideline. In highly dynamic environment,
like a disaster management, to find a satisfactory mapping of Relational
Databases (RDBs) onto a global model is a huge problem. The task of integrating
heterogeneous information sources has several approaches. We consider
a semantic mapping between an application-independent ontology and RDBs.
Objectives and Organization
Semantic Interoperability is challenging. If information systems are integrated
with a common ontology, they will share a familiar underlying structure and then
knowledge can be more easily shared. Our research explores the semantic interoperability
on humanitarian aid and proposes a methodology for heterogeneous
systems to be more readily shared with other different databases. An applicationindependence
ontology in the humanitarian aid domain acts as a link between
any data sources in the domain. We develop an application-independence common
ontology for Humanitarian Aid for Refugee in Emergencies (HARE) that it
can support interoperation among heterogeneous systems and provide the guideline
for semantic interoperability among existing RDB of humanitarian aid in
emergencies systems. The paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 provides background and related works. Section 3 describes our
ontology development methodology. Section 4 and 5 describe how HARE ontology
can be used to merging RDBs and explain the correspondence analysis
among existing disaster management systems through HARE ontology. Section
6 concludes the paper.
Background
Semantic Interoperability Through Ontologies
A survey in [8] reported that ontologies and current technologies could be used
to identify and associate semantically corresponding concepts in related disaster
information in order that heterogeneous data can be integrated. An ontology
is a conceptualization of data domain. It provides formal explicit definitions of
concepts (known as classes), properties (known as attributes) describing various
features of the concepts, restrictions on these properties and well-defined
relationships between concepts. The target of ontology in Information Science is
to define a common vocabulary for knowledge representation and specifies constraints
on the relationships between objects in an application domain. The basis
of an ontology can cope with the confusion and better enabling computers and
people to work in cooperation [3,12,23]. Because of the potential of an ontology,
one data source can be combined with another. Semantic interoperability allows
the applications to cooperate with minimal modifications [13]. Thus, the need
for ontologies to establish a common specification to deal with the entire disaster
management cycle is necessary.
Related Works
Ontology has been used in several ways of the disaster management. [10] is
finding suitable information in the open and distributed environment of current
geographic information web services in order to overcome semantic heterogeneity
during a keyword-based search. The strategy they used for building ontology is an
application-semi dependent ontology. [19] models the conceptual ontologies that
use the application-independent ontology strategy and this paper proposes service
for disaster querying system. [11] proposes a practical emergency response
ontology for collaborative crisis information management systems by using the
application-dependent ontology strategy. [24] constructs emergency ontology by
using the application-independent ontology strategy to support decision-making
directly from the emergency documentation. [14] proposes an emergency ontology
model using a hierarchical architecture, including upper ontology and application
ontology by using the application-independent ontology strategy.
Ontology has been applied in many research areas. The above researches
relate to ontology construction in different strategy. The ontology construction
without an application-dependence, which is necessary for the common ontology
construction, and the mapping between OWL and Relational Databases are
challenging.
Construction of the HARE Ontology
The construction of the HARE ontology reflects the need to design a global
ontology-based approach which is capable of dealing with an RDB. Our approach
to ontology construction has been started with information exploring from
a knowledge based of UNHCR handbook[2,15,16], which [15] contains 27 chapters
of a standard knowledge of international organization in 576 pages, [16]
contains 25 chapters in 325 pages, and [2] contains six chapters in 77 pages.
Humanitarian aid in emergencies is part of a complex system in which different
organization processes collaborate in sharing information on refugee’s profiles,
donations, rescue activities, and actors. The establishment of an ontology for the
HARE domain is a pre-requisite to developing an application.
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