Semantically rich depiction of the concepts for context-aware indoor routing brings appealing benefits for the safety of occupants of smart spaces in emergency evacuation. In this paper, we propose Smart Building Evacuation Ontology (SBEO), a reusable ontology for indoor spaces, based on three different data models: user, building, and context. We provide a common representation of indoor routing and navigation, describe users’ characteristics and preferences, grouping of individuals and their role in a specific context, hazards, and emergency evacuation. Among other characteristics, we consider abilities of individuals, safety and accessibility of spaces related to each person, intensity, impact, and severity of an emergency event or activity. SBEO is flexible and compatible with other ontologies of its domain, including SEAS, SSN/SOSA, SEMA4A, and empathi. We evaluate SBEO based on several metrics demonstrating that it addresses the information needs for the context-aware route recommendation system for emergency evacuation in indoor spaces. In the end, a simulation-based application example exploits SBEO using Context-Aware Emergency Evacuation Software (CAREE).