International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract

Ontologies provide a machine-processable description of entities and their properties, relationships and constraints, thus they can depict the semantics of disaster situations and related emergency tasks and thereby help to create connections between them for an efficient emergency response. As an ontology acts as the basic structure and knowledge base of an application, evaluation and assessment of the ontology are a critical point of the development process. Through the evaluation, the quality and the content of the ontology is assessed and it ensures that the ontology is well built, structured and contains all important concepts and relationships between them for sufficient reasoning. In this paper, an evaluation framework is proposed to evaluate an emergency situation ontology for which existing evaluation methods have been combined into a single framework, dividing the methods used into two phases: verification and validation. The verification of the ontology ensures that the ontology is correctly built. It evaluates the structure, functionality and representation of the ontology. Different metrics and common pitfalls are used to detect errors. The validation of the ontology ensures that the right ontology for the given application is built. This is achieved by competency questions and expert interviews.