Building an Ontology of Community Resilience

Abstract

Background: Community resilience to a disaster is a complex phenomenon studied using a variety of research lenses, such as psychological and ecological, resulting in a lack of consensus about what the key factors are that make a community resilient. Formally representing this knowledge will allow researchers to better understand the links between the knowledge generated using different lenses and help to integrate new findings into the existing body of knowledge. Objective: Using ontology engineering methods to represent this knowledge will provide a tool to aid researchers in the field. Methods: An ontology is a structured way of organizing and representing knowledge in the field of community resilience to a disaster. The model created using this method can be read by a computer, which allows a reasoner to manipulate and infer new knowledge. Results: When using these methods to structure community resilience knowledge some of the complexities and ambiguities were identified. These included semantic ambiguities, such as two distinct factors being used interchangeably or two terms being used to describe the same factor, making the distinction between what are the factors and the characteristics of those factors, and finally, the inherited characteristics and relationships associated with hierarchical relationships. Conclusions: Having the knowledge about community resilience to a disaster represented in an ontology will aid researchers when operationalizing this knowledge in the future.