Improving Dynamic Information Exchange in Emergency Response Scenarios

Emergency response scenarios are characterized by the participation of multiple agencies, which cooperate to control the situation and restore normality. These agencies can come from diverse areas of expertise which entails that they represent knowledge differently, using their own vocabularies and terminologies. This fact complicates the automation of the information-sharing process, creating problems such as ambiguity or specialisation. In this paper we present an approach to tackle these problems by domain-aware semantic matching. This method requires the formalisation of domain-specific terminologies which will be added to an existing system oriented to emergency response. Concretely, we have formalised terms from the UK Civil and Protection Terminology lexicon, which gathers some of the most common terms that UK agencies use in these scenarios.