Implementation of FAIR Principles for Ontologies in the Disaster Domain: A Systematic Literature Review
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Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
International Journal o f Geo-Information
Abstract
The success of disaster management efforts demands meaningful integration of data that
is geographically dispersed and owned by stakeholders in various sectors. However, the difficulty
in finding, accessing and reusing interoperable vocabularies to organise disaster management data
creates a challenge for collaboration among stakeholders in the disaster management cycle on data
integration tasks. Thus the need to implement FAIR principles that describe the desired features
ontologies should possess to maximize sharing and reuse by humans and machines. In this review,
we explore the extent to which sharing and reuse of disaster management knowledge in the domain
is inline with FAIR recommendations. We achieve this through a systematic search and review of
publications in the disaster management domain based on a predefined inclusion and exclusion
criteria. We then extract social-technical features in selected studies and evaluate retrieved ontologies
against the FAIR maturity model for semantic artefacts. Results reveal that low numbers of ontologies
representing disaster management knowledge are resolvable via URIs. Moreover, 90.9% of URIs to the
downloadable disaster management ontology artefacts do not conform to the principle of uniqueness
and persistence. Also, only 1.4% of all retrieved ontologies are published in semantic repositories
and 84.1% are not published at all because there are no repositories dedicated to archiving disaster
domain knowledge. Therefore, there exists a very low level of Findability (1.8%) or Accessibility
(5.8%), while Interoperability and Reusability are moderate (49.1% and 30.2 % respectively). The low
adherence of disaster vocabularies to FAIR Principles poses a challenge to disaster data integration
tasks because of the limited ability to reuse previous knowledge during disaster management phases.
By using FAIR indicators to evaluate the maturity in sharing, discovery and integration of disaster
management ontologies, we reveal potential research opportunities for managing reusable and
evolving knowledge in the disaster community.
Description
Keywords
FAIR, Ontologies, Disaster management, Interoperability
Citation
Mazimwe, A.; Hammouda, I.; Gidudu, A. Implementation of FAIR Principles for Ontologies in the Disaster Domain: A Systematic Literature Review. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10, 324. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijgi10050324