Modeling Spatial Scenes in Disaster Domain Ontologies

Disasters create extremely dynamic situations which have to be handled by emergency operations centers. For fulfilling their task they rely on up-to-date information from on-site units and passer-bys. Every individual has its own mental image of the situation which is recorded for situation evaluation as free-form text messages. In order to enable further automatic reasoning processes, this mental image must be taken into account. This paper focuses on modeling the topological and neighborhood relations of disaster situations. Also the spatial reasoning process and the important aspects of the used ontology are highlighted. A short introduction to orientation and distance aspects completes the required components for modeling spatial scenes as a whole.