Disaster response for Covid-19: a knowledge base to support decision-making

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic can be characterized as a biological disaster. The disaster management framework divides every disaster into four phases: Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery. Within the response to a biological disaster, decision-making about non-pharmaceutical interventions can be supported by making knowledge about those available to responders, notably health organizations. However, enabling informed decision-making usually requires data that needs to be integrated from multiple sources, thus causing issues of semantic interoperability between the information systems used to do so. Hence, adopting principles of design science research, this research work attempts to investigate the design of a knowledge base about non-pharmaceutical interventions, to be used for the integration of data from multiple sources that could lead to improve the support of decision-making within a biological disaster response. The designed artifact was dubbed SPECO and is applied within a specific scenario that fits to the research problem. Although a proof of concept was obtained, the knowledge base SPECO can be further extended to increase its range of competencies.