Ontologies for emergency management

In emergency management (EM), different domain vocabularies are used by distinct specialized actors involved in catastrophes’ response. Ontologies enables information sharing among them. This review of ontologies is an exploratory work aimed at collecting references of already proposed ontologies for the realm of EM; a first step for the proposal of a coherent and integrated architecture for EM ontologies. This work conforms to the PRISMA method and was performed by systematically searching several electronic databases for identifying proposed EM ontologies, published between the period of 1970 to 2021. From a total of 1885 articles identified, 104 articles met the full inclusion criteria for the systematic review. The articles found were classified according to (among other categories) the type of addressed disaster by the ontology, the main focus of the proposed approach, and the methods and techniques adopted. Despite the exploratory nature of this work, the review highlighted underexplored topics, and research gaps, due to the lack of integration of the ontological proposals, which hampers their semantic alignment in a modular architecture of ontologies, amenable of an infrastructure for distributed data sources of the Linked Open Data initiative.