Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies

• Extended version of the SEMA4A ontology with concepts about evacuation.
• Improved methodology for identifying, acquiring, creating and organizing knowledge.
• Implementation of the ontology using the standard Web Ontology Language (OWL).
• Evaluation of the ontology with both a quantitative and a qualitative method.
• Deployment of a use case demonstrating the usage of SEMA4A in a real scenario.

Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could become vulnerable because of exceptional circumstances such as stress, an unknown environment or even visual impairment (e.g. fire causing smoke). Within this scope, a crucial activity is to notify affected people about safe places and available evacuation routes. In order to address this need, we propose to extend an ontology, called SEMA4A (Simple EMergency Alert 4 [for] All), developed in a previous work for managing knowledge about accessibility guidelines, emergency situations and communication technologies. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic technique for knowledge acquisition and modeling on accessible evacuation routes. We introduce a use case to show applications of the ontology and conclude with an evaluation involving several experts in evacuation procedures.