When an emergency occurs or is going to occur, the aim of organizations and agenciesinvolved in the response phase is to restore quickly a safe situation and reducethe number of victims and damages.The notification of information about the kind of emergency, its characteristics,the location of safe places and available procedures for reaching them has a crucialrole in order to facilitate the evacuation of citizens. Several organizations andagencies have been promoting the development of Information Technology (IT)tools, called Emergency Response Information Systems (ERIS) for the managementof the activities performed in response to the emergencies. In particular, thesesystems provide modules for collecting, updating and notifying information aboutimminent disasters to potential affected people. Such notifications can be communicatedthrough different channels, like websites, emails, text or voice messages.But to effectively inform people about an emergency, the notifications should beadapted automatically to each user’s profile (e.g. functional or contextual disabilities,elderly, children), the kind of emergency (e.g. typhoon, earthquake, tornado),the communication channel (e.g. PDAs, smartphones, pagers) and any other exceptionalcircumstances (e.g. interrupted roads, collapsed exit, dangerous area).For example, when a fire occurs in a building, a blind person should be alerted byaudio signals or text messages (assuming she has a text-to-speech software on herdevice). Moreover, information can guide her to an assistant that can help her inreaching the exit.The efficacy of emergency notifications depends also on how different EmergencyNotification Systems (ENS) communicate and interoperate with each other inorder to share information even with different terminologies and types of disasters.For avoiding semantic incompatibilities, a common language is needed to improve the coordination not only among systems, but also among users. In fact, codifyingthe semantics of shared information in an accessible way could help citizens ininterpreting notifications without misunderstandings and emergency operators incommunicating among them.Modelling knowledge on alerting and evacuation processes, using expert systems,neural networks or ontologies, can help in personalizing emergency notificationsand evacuation procedures. In particular, we posit that the knowledge baserequired for the personalization mechanism should cover at least four domains: accessibility,technology, emergency and evacuation procedures. These domains coverthe factors to take into account for adapting the notifications. Consequently, the accessibilityis considered a representation for the user’s profile, technology for theinteractive devices and the communication channel, emergency for the characteristicsof the situation and evacuation procedures for the escaping measures.In this thesis, we propose the design of an ontology called SEMA4A (SimpleEmergency Alerts 4 [for] All). The ontology is a knowledge representation based onsemantic rules that allows to model articulated knowledge through the definitionof complex relations among concepts from different domains. This choice is alsorelated to the possibility of using specific tools based on first order logic for verifyingthe validity and the integrity of the proposed representation.The development of the ontology has to meet the objectives that motivated thisresearch work: consistency, completeness, understandability and interoperabilitywith existent systems and protocols. For the consistency, we have run a reasonertool called Pellet obtaining that there are not redundancies and the mapping issyntactically coherent.Concerning completeness and understandability, we have performed a quantitativeand a qualitative evaluation. The goal of the quantitative evaluation is tocompute three well-known functions in the domain of ontological engineering: precision,coverage and accuracy. These three measures evaluate how much the ontologyis representative respect to the domains of interest (i.e. accessibility, emergency,evacuation and technology). In the qualitative evaluation, we have involved internationalexperts in accessibility, evacuation and emergency to test the validity ofthe proposed mapping with respect to their expertise.Finally, the interoperability has been guaranteed codifying SEMA4A with a standardlanguage called OWL (Ontology Web Language) and following formal recommendationspublished as an initiative of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).Taking into account the results obtained from the evaluations, we posit that theproposed ontology addresses needed information for sharing and integrating alertnotifications about emergencies and evacuation procedures into existent solutions(i.e. notification mechanisms, information systems, communication protocols). Asproof of this, we have developed three use cases in collaboration with the DEIGroup of the University Carlos III of Madrid. SEMA4A has been applied for adaptingavailable information considering several factors: the user’s profile, the kind ofemergency, the communication channel and other exceptional circumstances. Thefirst use case, called CAPONES, sends emergency alerts adapting the content andthe visualization to the needs of involved users. The second system is NERES whichaims at generating and notifying personalized evacuation routes. The last case isthe EmergenSYS platform that provides three different mobile tools for sendingalerts in two directions: from citizens to emergency operators and from emergencyoperators to citizens. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
展开▼
