COMRADES (Collective Platform for Community Resilience and Social Innovation during Crises, www.comrades-project.eu) aims to empower communities with intelligent socio-technical solutions to help them reconnect, respond to, and recover from crisis situations.
This deliverable analyses the COMRADES requirements from different project perspectives in order to design and implement a common semantic model that represents micro emergency events and related metadata. In particular we analyse: 1) the data structures used by the Ushahidi platform since it is used as the underlying platform of the COMRADES system; 2) the requirements for the tools that need to be integrated into COMRADES platform; 3) stakeholder interviews, and; 4) the structure of crisis related datasets.
Based on the NeOn methodology [1] and a qualitative and structural design approach [2], we created an Ontology Requirement Specification Document (ORSD) [3] that highlights the needs and specifies the competency questions that the model needs to address in order to comply with the COMRADES model requirements.
Following the development of the ORSD, we implement the COMRADES model as an ontology using RDF/OWL. In order to allow the usage of the ontology in multilingual scenarios we translate the classes, properties and relation names to different languages. Finally, for improving the interoperability of the model with existing ontological models we align some part of the COMRADES ontology with well-known ontologies such as SIOC and FOAF.
Although we cannot completely evaluate the ontological model since some data is not yet available for the model (i.e. the COMRADES platform is not yet fully developed), we show that the model can successfully represent 102 different competency questions.