In recognition of the fact that many features of a disaster are independent of the type of event, a generic disaster management metamodel has been developed. The metamodel is aimed at domain practitioners such as emergency managers with the goal of enabling knowledge to be structured appropriately, and subsequently shared, in disaster management situations, thus aiding decision making.

The development of the metamodel follows an eight-step iterative process adapted from previous work by some of the paper’s authors and is based on an analysis of existing knowledge models across the four phases of disaster management: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. This process makes use of 37 disaster management models, from an original set of 85, in order to initiate and validate the metamodel. Details are provided on how each step was applied to create the metamodel, which is represented in the form of unified modeling language (UML) diagrams of classes of concepts for each of the four disaster management phases. Further, three techniques are employed to validate the metamodel in terms of generality, expressiveness, and completeness, leading to the presentation of refined UML diagrams. A number of limitations of the metamodel are identified, including cultural bias due to only considering models presented in English, lack of formal evaluation by practitioners, and its representation of common practice rather than best practice, which is attributable to its broad basis. Ambitions for future work are outlined and are aimed at overcoming the limitations mentioned.