

The paper addresses the issue of context-aware operational decision support in emergency situations. A decision support system developed for this purpose is implemented as a network of a set of Web-services. Web-services are designed to organize a service network according to context represented by a “problem model,” which specifies problems to be solved in a particular kind of emergency situation. Context representation is based on knowledge extracted from the application domain (application ontology) and is formalized by a set of constraints. The purpose of the service network is to provide a decision support system with contextualized information from diverse information sources and to solve the problems specified in the context . The paper presents the process of designing an application ontology for the emergency management domain from Semantic Web Ontologies, and a hybrid technology for context-aware operational decision support. The technology is based on ontology management, context management, constraint satisfaction, and Web Services. Application of the above ideas is illustrated by an example of a decision support system for real-time resource management in logistics operations for fire response.