Ontology meta-model for building a situational picture of catastrophic events

The overall goal of the research described in this paper is to design a general methodology for situation assessment to support crisis management. The purpose of situation assessment is to produce contextual understanding and interpretation of the relationships between various entities, events and behaviors of interest. One of the main challenges of designing a situation assessment process is to provide a formal structure for ontological analyses of domain-specific types of entities, attributes, situations, and the relationships between them. This paper presents an attempt to confront this challenge by utilizing formal philosophical categories and theories to design a formal ontology of catastrophic events that describe the most basic and relevant structures of objective reality. The ontology is designed from both a top-down philosophical perspective (from abstract level to domain-specific level) and a bottom-up application-based perspective (from domain-specific level to abstract level). Situations are characterized by spatial items of interest (SNAP) at different levels of granularity (objects, aggregates, combination of aggregates), temporal items of interest (SPAN) that characterize the behaviors of SNAP items, and the relations between them.