An ontological data model to support urban flood disaster response

Abstract

This work aims to develop an ontological data model to support urban flood disaster response. The preliminary studies of the existing flood ontologies revealed that the developed ontologies do not express the relationships between the different levels of administration involved during flood disasters. So, an ontology named Flood Disaster Support Ontology (FDSO) was developed. The FDSO acts as a data model that can accommodate the various organisations and agents of different levels of the administrative agencies that are part of the flood disaster management process. It depicts their relationships and their activities specifically during an urban flood disaster response. The ontology also organises the resources and the information about them that are possessed by different organisations and may be used by first responders to carry out the activities such as rescue and relief. An amalgamation of two existing methodologies Yet Another Methodology for Ontology Development (YAMO) and NeOn was used to construct the ontology. The ontology was evaluated syntactically using reasoners along with the OOPS!, an OntOlogy pitfall scanner, whereas the semantic evaluation was done through SPARQL queries. The process yielded satisfactory results.