CAP-ONES: An emergency notification system for all

In this paper we present an ontology-based system for managing emergency alert notifications. Our purpose is to generate emergency alerts that are accessible to different kinds of people, paying special attention to more vulnerable collectives like impaired people. By adapting alerts to different devices and users we can allow Emergency Management Systems (EMS) to communicate with collectives like blind or deaf people whom otherwise will be unreachable by usual channels. Moreover, if we consider the constrains imposed by the nature of the emergency situations we can also improve the information transmission to cope with situational disabilities (e.g. smoke during a fire can cause low vision problems). We centered our system architecture on two characteristics: The first one is an ontology that codifies knowledge about accessibility, devices, disabilities, emergencies and media so the alert notification can be tailored according to different parameters; the second one is the use of an open standard like the CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) that enables our system to interoperate with other existing systems.