Abstract
In a rescue scenario, you have personnel from different organizations cooperating, and this
personnel has to communicate both within their own organization and with personnel from
other organizations. If they are carrying handheld devices, they can receive and send
automatic information updates within a mobile ad-hoc network that consists of all of the
handheld devices carried by rescue personnel and sensors that are within range. A challenge
with this kind of information sharing is that different organizations may use different data
models and vocabularies for defining the same concepts. Ontologies can be used as a bridge
between these different vocabularies, enabling a mapping between the concepts of the
different vocabularies. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) can be used to express the
ontologies.
OWL is a very expressive language, and has the advantage that it is possible to perform
reasoning over ontologies and infer knowledge that is not explicitly stated. The only problem
is that reasoning engines for OWL typically require a lot of resources, and are therefore not
well suited for resource-limited handheld devices.
Topic maps is another technology for expressing ontologies. Topic maps are less expressive
than OWL and do not provide support for automated reasoning, but there exists a topic map
engine that allows you to browse and query the topic map and that can be used on resourcelimited
devices.
OWL is built on another language called the Resource Description Framework (RDF), and the
topic map and RDF communities have looked at how these two different languages can be
translated into each other. Since OWL is built on RDF, we look into if any of the translation
proposals for translating between RDF and topic maps also can be used for translating
between OWL and topic maps. This will allow us to create an ontology in OWL, perform
reasoning on the ontology and add the information inferred from the reasoning to the ontology
directly. Then the ontology can be translated into a topic map, and can be used on a handheld
device. This thesis looks at how one can translate ontologies from OWL to topic maps, and
how usable the resulting topic maps are in a mobile ad-hoc network for a rescue operation.