DoRES — A Three-tier Ontology for Modelling Crises in the Digital Age

During emergency crises it is imperative to collect, organise, analyse and share critical information between individuals and humanitarian organisations. Although different models and platforms have been created for helping these particular issues, existing work tend to focus on only one or two of the previous matters. We propose the DoRES ontology for representing information sources, consolidating it into reports and then, representing event situation based on reports. Our approach is guided by the analysis of 1) the structure of a widely used situation awareness platform; 2) stakeholder interviews, and; 3) the structure of existing crisis datasets. Based on this, we extract 102 different competency questions that are then used for specifying and implementing the new three-tiers crisis model. We show that the model can successfully be used for mapping the 102 different competency questions to the classes, properties and relations of the implemented ontology.