Prototyping and Evaluation of a Computerized Emergency Management System Based on an Ontological Inference Design

In this paper we discuss the design of a computerized emergency management system that uses ontology-based inference to improve situation awareness and decision making. The proposed system architecture is embodied in a prototype called SAVER (Situation Aware Vigilant Emergency Reasoner) which is successfully tested and evaluated. The results validate the concept and show that an ontology-based system can be used to transform incoming data into a meaningful and useful form and predict future states of situations using inference and rules.