Integrating Process Modeling and Linked Open Data to Improve Decision Making in Disaster Management

In disaster management, personnel of the involved organizations need to make quick, but informed decisions. Many activities need to be coordinated within and across organizational borders. The information basis available to decision makers is typically sparse, and still relies mainly on radio reports from the field. We propose an approach to extend this information base: First, techniques from business process management should be used to formally describe the activities in disaster management; second, the elements of the resulting process models should be annotated with tags derived from the concepts characterized by an emergency management domain ontology. These annotated process models serve as basis for retrieving relevant contextual information, e.g. from linked data pools provided by governmental agencies. Our approach will allow disaster management personnel to take a contextualized perspective on planned and ongoing actions, and facilitate quicker and more informed decisions.