Towards a common understanding relevance and exemplary methodology of creating a joint terminology for crisis and disaster management

In emergencies, crises and disasters, precise and distinct communication is a critical factor for successful management. Experiences of managing large scale events show, that not only language barriers, but also differences in the and between organizations, practices, tools, technical terms , and resources of disaster management create potential for friction, misunderstanding and consequently inadequate decisions. The use of different terms for identical items such as actors, objects, and processes also hampers effective communication between involved stakeholders. Moreover, the use of the same term in different contexts or domains is potentially leading to a lack of understanding and consequently, reduced efficiency. This is due to the fact, that different organizations often use implicitly or explicitly different definitions for the same term or more coarser or finer differentiations and subdivisions. Despite this crucial importance and critical potential of clear and concise communication, crisis management organizations scarcely pro-actively address the topic of the terminology of their domain. Although there are several national and international organizations as well as research projects providing sets of terminologies and even taxonomies, their common application and use in practice often does not sufficiently take place and insulated approaches are standing practice. In order to enhance semantic interoperability in future crisis and disaster management, the path towards a basic methodology for creating a thesaurus by cross-referencing internationally acknowledged and accepted terminologies is presented in this paper. In addition to the compilation of a thesaurus in the area of crisis and disaster management, an evolving process to quantify similarities of different definitions of the same terms was identified as necessary and developed in the course of the projects EPISECC and DRIVER+. In a subsequent paper, a proof of the generated methodology will be presented by taking test terms from relevant selected sources. Such sources are represented by terminologies such as the standard “ISO 22300: 2018(en), Security and resilience” or the “UNISDR Terminology on Disaster Risk Reduction (Sendai Framework)” from 2009. By providing a contextually enriched overview on terms and definitions, this thesaurus and the underlying methodology support fostering a future common understanding and frictionless communication and information exchange in crisis and disaster management. This process and the evolving outputs are apt to be enriched, transferred, and used in other projects, standardization initiatives, but above all in the practical application of crisis and disaster management.