Mapping between dynamic ontologies in support of geospatial data integration for disaster management

The effective management of disasters requires providing relevant and right information to the concerned decision makers. By its nature, disaster management involves multiple actors and organizations, potentially implying a significant volume of geospatial data coming from heterogeneous and autonomous geospatial data sources. Integration of these data sources is difficult not only because of the semantic heterogeneity of data but also because of the dynamic nature of the reality that is studied. The dynamic aspect of the reality has a direct impact in the conceptualisation of such a reality by adding different event categories to the domain ontology, thus making more complicated to apply existing methods for the mapping and integration of ontologies. In this article, we highlight some problems of heterogeneity that complicate the integration of ontologies composed of objects and events concepts; we also propose a similarity model designed to support mapping of these ontologies.