Information Systems interoperability as a way to Partners Integration in a Crisis Context
Résumé
In a critical context (natural disaster, crash etc.), different actors from several organizations (medical staff, police, etc.) have to coordinate their actions while working simultaneously in a hurry. Their cooperation is an essential means to reach their common goal, corresponding to crisis reduction. The partner organizations involved in such crisis have to set up a Cooperative Information Systems (CIS) integrating their respective heterogeneous and autonomous information systems. This CIS is the linking support between ISs in order to merge them in a global System of Systems (SoS – running collaborative processes, using shared resources of partners, etc.). It have to meet the unavoidable evolutions of the crisis and to remain adapted and rightly dedicated to the – possibly changing – group of involved partners working on the crisis. One of the main issues, when building such a CIS, is the interoperability of the participating ISs. It requires the definition of a common Universe of Discourse (UoD – view of the crisis domain) which is essential to solve the various semantic conflicts that are bound to occur between the participating ISs. This paper proposes a UML metamodel of crisis contexts to represent this UoD and then derives the corresponding ontology on top of which a CIS can be built. This ontology has been implemented with OWL and consequently provides means for acquiring, sharing and reasoning about crisis information and knowledge.