Building a Domain Ontology to Design a Decision Support Software to Plan Fight Actions against Marine Pollutions

The return on experience in techniques to combat pollution show that their effectiveness depends on the situations in which they are implemented and that their choice is not trivial. From the maritime field perspective, the objective of the paper is to present a software tool to assist crisis management staff to minimise pollution impact due to maritime accidents. From a methodological perspective, the objective of the paper is to show the importance to develop ontologies (i) for structuring a domain as perceived by its actors and (ii) for building computer tools aimed to support problem solving in that domain. Such tools are endowing knowledge shared by the actors of the domain, what make them more effective within critical situations. The followed designing methodological process is based on the Cognitive Engineering method "Knowledge Oriented Design” (KOD). In the paper, the methodological process will be detailed. The resulting ontology, the architecture of the software tool and the plan generation mechanism will be presented and discussed.