The Expertise Ontology: Modeling Expertise in the Context of Emergency Management

It is crucial for emergency management organizations to have rapid access to relevant experts who can advise and assist following a disaster. To improve expert-mining and recommendation capabilities, creating a knowledge graph that links experts to their corresponding topics of expertise and other sources of relevant information is a natural choice to capture an integrated network of people and a rich taxonomy of expertise. In this paper, we present an ontology for modeling experts, their expertise topics and relations between them, and their spatiotemporal scoping. We go on to discuss the primary conceptual components and how they can be instantiated, then present overarching examples related to emergency management operations. The ontology synthesizes three different ways to characterize an expert, based on a) identifiable academic expertise; b) voluntary engagements, work-related responsibilities or experience; and c) organization specializations or affiliations.