Ontology-supported rule-based reasoning for emergency management

Abstract Emergency situations (disasters) occur regularly, and they present a vast risk for human lives and infrastructures. Reactions to disasters can vary depending upon the availability of resources and the location of the emergency. Planning is essential for quick and efficient responses to emergencies in every location. In this chapter, a rule-based reasoning approach to emergency management has been formulated, on the basis of which we will make recommendations for recovery from emergencies. All the required facts should be collected first and then represented in the appropriate form. Both of these tasks take time, and time can be a determinant between death and life for the affected persons. We propose ontology-supported rule-based reasoning to automate this process of decision support in order to recommend actions faster than a human beings are capable of doing and under any circumstances. An extensible knowledge model (Resource Description Framework) has been framed using semantic technology, in which the data are described in triplet (subject, predicate, object) form. Ontology has been used to build a knowledge base that can store procedures and facts about emergencies, and experts’ advice is stored in the form of rules.