An ontology for cross-sectoral crisis management: core and public health modules
Organizations: University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy · San Raffaele University of Rome, Rome, Italy · Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany · Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology, Italian National Research Council, Bologna, Italy · European Commission, Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, Brussels, Belgium · European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy
Abstract
This paper presents the European Crisis Management Ontology (ECMO), a modular OWL-based ontology intended as a cross-sectoral reference for disaster risk reduction and response. ECMO is designed to be organised as a network of ontological modules. Among the modules, ECMO-CORE captures fundamental crisis management concepts such as hazard, event, exposure, impact, and response measure and uses ontology design patterns and the OWL2 punning technique to resolve ambiguities between hazard types and event manifestations. In addition, domain-specific modules are defined as in the case of the public health module aligned with SNOMED CT and ICD-11. To demonstrate the resource's utility, we used ECMO to represent the data of the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources system of the Joint Research Centre to generate an end-to-end pipeline that populates an ECMO-compliant knowledge graph from unstructured epidemiological news. Initial results demonstrate that ECMO provides the formal guardrails necessary for consistent and unified knowledge representation and integration. The ontology is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20070268 and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Figures & tables
| ID | Name | Description | Key concepts |
|---|---|---|---|
| F1 | Risk | Concepts that characterise disaster risk as a relational configuration of hazard, exposure, vulnerability and capacity. | DisasterRisk , DisasterRiskAssessment , AcceptableRisk , ResidualRisk |
| F2 | Hazard | Concepts that describe the physical or anthropogenic processes that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, social and economic disruption, or environmental damage. | Hazard , HazardousEvent , MultiHazardContext |
| F3 | Disaster | Concepts that describe the occurrence, scale and population effects of disasters (serious disruptions of the functioning of a community or society) triggered by hazardous events. Sub-types distinguish onset speed, scale and frequency. | Disaster , DisasterManagement , SuddenOnset , SlowOnset |
| F4 | Exposure and Vulnerability | Concepts that characterise the susceptibility of people, assets and systems to hazard impacts. | Exposure , Vulnerability , VulnerabilityDimension , ExposedElement |
| F5 | Capacity and Resilience | Concepts that characterise the ability of communities, organisations and systems to manage disaster risk and adapt to adverse conditions. | Capacity , Resilience |
| F6 | Governance and Management | Concepts that describe the institutional, policy and legal structures through which disaster risk is governed and managed. | RiskGovernance , RiskReduction , RiskManagement |