  The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic of the new COVID-19 disease (COVID-19
for short) demands empowering existing medical, economic, and social emergency
backend systems with data analytics capabilities. An impediment in taking
advantages of data analytics in these systems is the lack of a unified
framework or reference model. Ontologies are highlighted as a promising
solution to bridge this gap by providing a formal representation of COVID-19
concepts such as symptoms, infections rate, contact tracing, and drug
modelling. Ontology-based solutions enable the integration of diverse data
sources that leads to a better understanding of pandemic data, management of
smart lockdowns by identifying pandemic hotspots, and knowledge-driven
inference, reasoning, and recommendations to tackle surrounding issues.
