Emergency alerts for all: An ontology based approach to improve accessibility in emergency alerting systems

When a disaster occurs it is critical that emergency response information systems share a common ontology to support their disaster management alerting functions and notifications. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so it is crucial, for emergency systems, to be able to transmit them to all kinds of recipients. An ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deaf people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages and contents over different emergency response information systems and to be accessible under different conditions and for different kind of users.