SHAREODS An Ontology Data Service for Search and Rescue Operations.pdf

Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR ‘Demokritos’, Aghia Paraskevi 153 10, Athens, Greece Stasinos Konstantopoulos, Georgios Paliouras, Symeon Chatzinotas {konstant,paliourg,schatzin}@iit.demokritos.gr SHARE-ODS: An Ontology Data Service for Search and Rescue Operations Tech. Report DEMO-2006-1 January 2006 Abstract This report describes an ontology data service (ODS) for supporting Search and Rescue (SaR) operations. The ontological model represents various aspects of the command, communication, and organisational structure of the SaR forces and the deployment and progress of a SaR operation. Furthermore, the ontology supports the semantic indexing of multimedia documents in the context of SaR processes and activities. This ODS supports a semantically-enhanced informa- tion and communication system for SaR forces. Modelling the spatio-temporal aspects of an operation in alignment with possibly-unreliable information auto- matically extracted from multimedia objects, introduces a number of challenges for the field of knowledge representation and reasoning. Chapter 1 Introduction Search-and-rescue (SaR) operations are conducted by fire-brigade, rescue and medical units, operating under a complex unified command-and-communications structure. Currently, the communication channels of the emergency units are simple push-to-talk walkie-talkies and short written messages (Message Forms) that are written by hand and/or read over the radio. All status information, reporting and documentation for decision making is processed manually. The work presented here is done in the framework of the SHARE project, which develops a push-to-share (PTS) advanced mobile service to provide com- munication support for emergency oper