Information Theoretic Approach to Design of Emergency Response Systems

Recent natural disasters have highlighted the need for disaster preparedness, planning, and management. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the usefulness of Web sites in dealing with natural disasters. However, little is known about the necessary contents and structures of Web-based information systems for natural disaster management. In this paper, we focus on developing an ontology structure of elements for Web-based disaster management systems. Web elements are identified, following a grounded-theory approach, from an inventory of Web pages drawn from disaster management Web sites. Selected semi structured Data representation approaches are used to organize the resulting ontology structure, which consists of 2094 Web elements. Wilma, impacted millions of lives [1]. Katrina devastated nearly 90 000 square miles. Rita struck within a month, damaging and destroying more than 350 000 residences [2]. The use of the Web in disaster recovery efforts demonstrated the usefulness of Web sites in dealing with a disaster. The ubiquity and asynchrony of the Internet make it a natural platform for information exchange and communication for managing mass crises. Although there are many disaster-related Web sites, little is known about the necessary contents and structures of such sites. This paper presents a first attempt in developing an ontology structure of elements for such Web sites. We strive to answer the following research questions. 1) What data representation approaches are suitable for developing an ontology structure of Web elements in Web-based natural disaster management systems (WB-NDMS)? 2) What are the necessary Web elements and their ontology structure for WB-NDMS? 3) How should one develop such an ontology structure based on available sample data? 4) How can such an ontology structure be distributed online for easy navigation? An accessible and comprehensive ontology structure developed in this research, called Web-based ontology structure (WB-OS), can potentially assist organizations, managers, and individuals who are involved in disaster management in their WB-NDMS development and evaluation. First, it provides a useful resource to those who are involved in developing WBNDMS.WB-OS covers all phases of natural disaster management and allows easy navigation of the ontology structure at different levels of detail. II. BACKGROUND Across the world, disasters happen frequently. There are various types of disasters, including natural disaster, technological disaster, pandemic disaster [7], and mass violence, where each of which has certain level and type of impacts [8]. Although the impacts of disasters have been extensively investigated, there has been inadequate research on the design of disaster management …