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The originally planned "Ontology Applications in Emergency Response Panel Discussion" (previously slated for 2006-08-31) is being rescheduled

  • Discussion Topic: "Ontology Applications in Emergency Response Panel Discussion"
  • Co-Organizer: Rex Brooks & Bob Smith
  • Preparation - see below
  • General Agenda for Emergency Response Ontology, NCOR, Registry Workshops
    • ARL does sponsor Seminars that meet these criteria
      • Concept Development focus?
      • Ontology Standards in Military Context focus?
      • Budget Estimation or Cost Drivers (See YorkSure's LoC)

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Emergency Response Ontology Application Discussion Session Preparation Page

Format and Initial Agenda Questions

Problem Statement

The world has changed since 9/11, Indonesian tsunamis and Hurricane Katrina / Rita demonstrate the need for improved Decision Support Systems.

  • Among these changes:
    • Information Sharing is no longer optional, from radio frequencies to secure, trusted networks, and more/improved ISACs are imperative;
    • Recognizing Fail-Points needs to be completely, unconditionally, accepted instead of avoided;
    • Interoperability and SOA must rise above both the current level of apparent marketing acceptance and exploitation with vendor-specific packaging, and adhere to increasing levels of inter-vendor interoperability based on standard vocabularies and data models expressed in XML and RDF-OWL;
    • Recognizing Fail-Points and achieving interoperability must be done in highly adaptable, SCALABLE methodologies.

Questions for the Panel to consider

  • 1. How can we provide improved decision support through ontologies in both Emergency Response Management and Health Informatics in ways that are measurably scalable?
    • Specifically, how can we address the problems presented by exploding

injury/illness specifications such as HL7 v.3 as well as the enormous increase in system-wide data inputs that will accompany the inevitable uptake of HIT.

    • One should not expect a single solution. Different communities and situations will have different criteria and metrics for quality and scalability, but there can be some common infrastructure that the solutions can share.
  • 2. How can we implement any of the lessons learned from Dr. Brailer's guided prototyping of a Nationwide Health Information Network for an ERMS ?
    • Can we specifically require that the values underpinning NHIN, such

as eliminating vendor-specific lock-ins, ensuring that urban, rural and exurban communities can develop operational interoperability while maintaining the best fit to their scales?

    • Public, Private, Combined Funding?
  • 3. Can we realistically include the integration of Sensor-based alerting and the concepts inherent in oBIX as well as EDXL to Risk-Analysis-based and Bayesian Belief Networks in the growing GIG environment?
    • Public, Private, Combined Funding?
    • Different scales will have different solutions. Can the Grants and Research program officers be informed of the business values from requiring common re-usable components that meet OWL-DL like standards?
  • 4. How do we move toward an explicit process modeling, using, for instance, the Taxo-Thesaurus methodology and the results of ongoing explorations within the Ontolog Forum of developing evaluation criteria for rating ontologies and connecting ontologies and databases in ways that facilitate the development of improved Decision Support Systems?

NOTE: We have a total of 2 hours, and typically 1 to 1.5 hour for all the panelists' presentations:


  • Panel of 4 members, each with 4-6 slides and 5-10 minutes to present
    • Rex Brooks: Executive Director, Starbourne Communications Design
      • Identifying the Critical Path to Improved Decision Support Lessons from Standards Development: Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Family of Specifications
    • Bob Smith: Tall Tree Labs, Ontology Management Team
      • Ontology Applications in ERS Management: The Roles of Decision Support Ontology for Improving Inter-Agency Responses to Known and Unknown Threats
    • Michelle Raymond: Honeywell, Principal Research Scientist
      • Ontology Silos and Emergency Response Management Systems: incorporating Situational Based Alerting and Decision Support Services
    • Professor Ken Baclawski: Computer Science Dept, Northeastern University
      • Achieving situation awareness of emergency response teams
  • Panel Discussion (about 15 minutes)
  • Session attendee's question and answer session (about 35 minutes)
    • Please NOTE: Panel members should remain on the phone to answer questions directed to them

Speakers Abstract and Bio Sketch

  • Rex Brooks, Executive Director, Starbourne Communications Design
    • Berkeley, California, USA
    • Topic Title: Ontology Application Design Requirements: Distinguishing between Emergency Response Management Systems AND Emergency Response SYSTEMS Management.
      • Rex applies his many years of consulting towards improved understanding of private & public sectors & related disciplines. He has over five years experience creating information technology standards as part of industry-wide teams. As Executive Director of a Non-Profit organization, he has aimed at improving individual information quality and control in digital information technology.
      • Rex currently serves on many Ontology related Information standards and research bodies including Co-Chair National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR) Committee on Ontology for Health Informatics, on OASIS: Emergency Management TC, Emergency Messages and Notifications Subcommittee, Co-Chair; Web Services for Remote Portlets TC; International Health Continuum TC; Service Oriented Architecture Reference Model TC;
      • Rex is a co-founder Humanmarkup.org, Inc. a 501 (c)(3) Non-Profit Corporation which he serves as Executive Director. Rex serves as co-chair of the OASIS Emergency Messages and Notifications Subcommittee of the Emergency Management Technical Committee (TC). He chairs the HumanMarkup TC, is a member of the International Health Continuum TC, as well as the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and Service-Oriented Architecture Reference Model TCs . These activities contribute to improving interoperability of vocabularies and data models from different disciplines, as well as the fidelity of communications
  • Bob Smith, Ph.D.Ontology Management Team
    • Tall Tree Labs

Huntington Beach, California, 92646

    • Topic Title: Ontology Applications in ERS Management: The Roles of Decision Support Ontology for Improving Inter-Agency Responses to Known and Unknown Threats
      • Bob is a semi-retired Professor Emeritus at the California State University currently involved in the analysis of ontology management and methodology projects. His experience with Strategic Assessment and Response DSS includes Healthcare (Trauma systems analysis and policy for several county and multi-county agencies); Law Enforcement (Decision Process Modeling for L.A. Sheriff's Department), Public Health (Water testing public and private laboratories); and Hospital Disaster Response Planning and Alerting (HIMMS Task Forces). His primary focus is now on modeling the knowledge coordination challenges to large organizations under conditions of extreme ambiguity with semantic tools (SemTalk 2.3 and Kayvium 6.1) Bob's doctorate in GDSS is from U.C. Irvine.
      • Bob is member of NCOR's Health Informatics, OASIS's oBIX WG ( open Building Information eXchange), StratML (applied), Water Channel ISAC, and HB CERT (Community Emergency Response Team).
  • Michelle Raymond, Principal Research Scientist, Knowledge Services, Advanced Technologies Lab
    • Honeywell ACS Labs

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55418 USA michelle.raymond@honeywell.com

    • Topic Title: Ontology Silos and Emergency Response Management Systems: Interoperability with Situational Based Alerting and Decision Support Services
      • Michelle Raymond is a Principal Research Scientist at Honeywell ACS Labs. She began working with Web technologies in 1995 at The Geometry Center, a National Science Foundation Research Center. In 1996 she joined the Honeywell Laboratories. She began in Human Centered Systems and in 2002 transferred to the Knowledge Services section of the Advanced Technologies Lab. Her main expertise is in knowledge technologies and device independent system design, development and usability. Her current focus is on Incident Command, Decision Support and Personalized Emergency Alerting.
      • Michelle is an associate member of OASIS, working on the Emergency Management TC. She was an editor for the Emergency Data Exchange Language Distribution Element (EDXL-DE) Specification. Michelle is also a volunteer member of the Minnesota-Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MN-ISAC), is a Citizen Core volunteer through the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program and has completed the National Incident Management System (NIMS) FEMA certification. She has given presentations and workshops on knowledge technologies, user interface design, and programming for the Internet
  • Kenneth Baclawski, Associate Professor, College of Computer and Information Science
    • Northeastern University

Boston, MA 02115, USA email: Ken-at-Baclawski.com

    • Topic Title: Achieving situation awareness of emergency response teams
      • Interoperability of information sources is essential for effective emergency

response. However, the ultimate goal of an ERMS is to achieve situation awareness so that appropriate decisions can be made and actions taken. Uncertain and missing information further complicates the problem. This talk will discuss some of the theoretical and practical issues for an ERMS to assist in achieving situation awareness from noisy and possibly unreliable sources. Ontologies play a fundamental role not only for interoperability but also for situation awareness.

      • Ken's Areas of Interest include: High-Performance Ontology-Based Computing;

Knowledge Bases for Biology and Medicine; Ontologies for: Life Sciences, Situation Awareness and Wireless Communication. His book, Ontology for Bioinformatics is described at http://ontobio.org/

      • In addition to academic experiences, Ken has also served as Chief Scientist. Jarg Corporation, Waltham, MA http://www.jarg.com/ . Jarg Corporation helps software developers to fully exploit the new world of semantic applications offering powerful knowledge indexing platform and productivity tools to make semantic applications faster and more flexible to use. Jarg offers technology for Semantic Search, Information Filtering and Categorization that promises to bring its users the most accurate knowledge retrieval, with queries expressed as complete sentences, using the user's own professional vocabulary.
      • Service Activities over the last 3 years include: Member, Scientific Advisory Board of the Virtual Plant Information Network (VPIN). http://vpin.ncgr.org/ ; National Center for Genome Resources. Member, Biodata Study Group. National Institutes of Health. Tutorial Presenter, Introduction to the Semantic Web for Bioinformatics. Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference. Ken's Ph.D. was earned in1976 from Harvard University (Mathematics)
  • Glossary link about here ERHIGlossary

(-- Bob Smith Rex Brooks / 2007.1.7 5pm)



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