Modelling emergency response processes: Comparative study on OWL and UML

The increasing number of natural and man-made disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, traffic accidents, has demonstrated the importance of disaster management. Disaster management is complex; it involves many actors and large amount of information. It is important to understand the interrelations between the DM components – tasks, processes – and the responsible parties – actors, sectors – as well as the flow of information. The present research is a part of an ongoing work on building ontology for disaster management in the Netherlands. The ontology captures the structure and relations by modelling the process, the tasks, the actors and the information. It represents relations between processes and tasks, relations between sectors and actors, tasks and information. By simple inference, it becomes clear which actor needs what information. Modelling of disaster management processes can be done is several ways. In this paper the work is carried out both in OWL-DL and in UML. The OWL-DL and UML have many similarities in that they both provide the same elements, e.g., classes, attributes, relations (UML use the term associations and OWL uses the term properties). However the two languages are designed for different purposes and thus provide different facilities for modelling. This paper presents a comparative study on the applicability of the two approaches to the modelling of disaster management processes.