Using Ontological Information to Enhance Responder Availability in Emergency Response

Ensuring effective communications during emergencies is an important issue for any functional government. One way to address this issue is to ensure the availability of the key personnel capable of making the appropriate decisions and taking timely actions with sufficient resources. Many XML-based languages such as the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) and associated Common Alert Protocol (CAP) have been designed to provide a basis for such communications. To ensure that messages are delivered in a timely manner, we propose some role and task based ontological enhancements for these languages. We show by example how the ontological enhancements can be used to enhance availability of emergency personnel in case of a need.