SHARE-ODS: An ontology data service for Search and Rescue operations

This paper describes an ontology data service (ODS) for supporting Search and Rescue (SaR operations. The ontological model represents various aspects of the command, communication, and organisational structure of the SaR force!; and the deployment and progress of a SaR operation. Furthermore, the ontology supports the semantic indexing of multimedia documents in the context of SaR processes and activities. This ODS supports a semantically-enhanced information and communication system for SaR forces. Modelling the spatio-temporal aspects of an operation in alignment with possibly-unreliable information automatically extracted from multimedia objects, introduces a number of challenges for the field of knowledge representation and reasoning.