Corresponding Author 
1091 
MODELING SPATIAL SCENES IN DISASTER DOMAIN ONTOLOGIES 
C. Lucas 3 *, S. Werder b 
3 Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (IPF), Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Kaiserstraße 12, 76128 
Karlsruhe, Germany - christian.lucas@ipf.uni-karlsruhe.de 
b Institute of Cartography and Geoinformatics (IKG), Leibniz Universität Hannover, Appelstraße 9a, 30167 Hannover, 
Germany - stefan.werder@ikg.uni-hannover.de 
Commission IV, WG IV/8 
KEY WORDS: Disaster Management, Topological Relations, Spatial Modeling, Image Understanding, Geographic 
Information Science 
ABSTRACT: 
Disasters create extremely dynamic situations which have to be handled by emergency operations centers. For fulfilling their task 
they rely on up-to-date information from on-site units and passer-bys. Every individual has its own mental image of the situation 
which is recorded for situation evaluation as free-form text messages. In order to enable further automatic reasoning processes, this 
mental image must be taken into account. This paper focuses on modeling the topological and neighborhood relations of disaster 
situations. Also the spatial reasoning process and the important aspects of the used ontology are highlighted. A short introduction to 
orientation and distance aspects completes the required components for modeling spatial scenes as a whole. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
1.1 Background Situation 
In the disaster management domain it is fundamental to 
visualize detailed up-to-date information of the situation. 
Thereby a situation map is an important decision base for an 
emergency operations center (EOC) and provides information 
sharing between the management staff. The up-to-date 
information originates from several on-site units and passer-bys 
located at diverse damage sites. Normally it is recorded as free 
form text messages. This variety of incoming messages has to 
be analyzed with respect to their visualization by one operator 
of the management staff. With regard to digitally distributed 
situation maps and in order to assist the updates, the aim of this 
project is to apply an automated system for simplifying and 
speeding up the message analysis. 
In order to implement the approach of a human operator with 
methods of information technology, several processing steps are 
necessary. Firstly, sentence detection and information extraction 
play a crucial role for formalizing and analyzing the message 
content. Subsequently, a step of semantic augmentation is 
necessary to harmonize the content, solve semantic gaps, and 
provide content based spatial reasoning. The final step is to 
create a graphical representation of the relevant information 
with respect to the domain specifics. 
Fundamental for processing, particularly for semantic 
augmentation, is a knowledge base. An ontology designed with 
domain specific considerations is used to provide the necessary 
knowledge. This includes background and context information 
about objects as well as the relations between them. The 
developed ontology, named Disaster Management Data Model 
(DM 2 ), was derived from the Command and Control 
Information Exchange Data Model (C2IEDM), used for military 
interoperability in the NATO (cf. Lucas et al. 2007). 
1.2 Spatial Scenes 
This paper focuses on modeling spatial aspects of objects in 
disaster domain specific ontologies. In this context the common 
spatial attributes of objects are their location as well as their 
geometric attributes (form, size and feature alignment). These 
elementary attributes are traditionally provided in spatial 
ontologies as well as geographic information systems (GIS) and 
allow describing discrete objects unambiguous by their 
dimension and location in space. 
Nevertheless, in order to support a spatial reasoning process for 
disaster events based on textual descriptions, a more 
comprehensive level of spatial information is necessary. The 
method of object modeling within the ontology has to be 
comparable with the mental model of the reporting person 
(Frank, 1998). A mental model represents the level of 
geographic perception of an average citizen, and characterizes 
thus the perspective view of an observer. This mental image of 
the situation is incomplete, represents objects which seem 
important to the observer and does not include detailed metrics 
(Barkowsky, 2002). This model contains besides discrete 
objects also spatial scenes with interactions of two or more 
spatial objects in the meaning of neighborhoods or part-of- 
relations. Thus a detailed information level is essential for 
analyzing e.g. coherences of cities, districts, damage sites, and 
operation areas as well as for solving ambiguities. According to 
that, the spatial attributes of topology, neighborhood, 
orientation, and distance have to be taken into account for 
defining spatial scenes. 
2. TOPOLOGICAL RELATIONS 
2.1 Domain Requirements 
The initial information state of a typical situation of the disaster 
management domain is presented in Figure 1. The situation is 
composed of a fire event and the respective affected regions.