2 research outputs found
Estimating Fire Weather Indices via Semantic Reasoning over Wireless Sensor Network Data Streams
Wildfires are frequent, devastating events in Australia that regularly cause
significant loss of life and widespread property damage. Fire weather indices
are a widely-adopted method for measuring fire danger and they play a
significant role in issuing bushfire warnings and in anticipating demand for
bushfire management resources. Existing systems that calculate fire weather
indices are limited due to low spatial and temporal resolution. Localized
wireless sensor networks, on the other hand, gather continuous sensor data
measuring variables such as air temperature, relative humidity, rainfall and
wind speed at high resolutions. However, using wireless sensor networks to
estimate fire weather indices is a challenge due to data quality issues, lack
of standard data formats and lack of agreement on thresholds and methods for
calculating fire weather indices. Within the scope of this paper, we propose a
standardized approach to calculating Fire Weather Indices (a.k.a. fire danger
ratings) and overcome a number of the challenges by applying Semantic Web
Technologies to the processing of data streams from a wireless sensor network
deployed in the Springbrook region of South East Queensland. This paper
describes the underlying ontologies, the semantic reasoning and the Semantic
Fire Weather Index (SFWI) system that we have developed to enable domain
experts to specify and adapt rules for calculating Fire Weather Indices. We
also describe the Web-based mapping interface that we have developed, that
enables users to improve their understanding of how fire weather indices vary
over time within a particular region.Finally, we discuss our evaluation results
that indicate that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art techniques
in terms of accuracy, precision and query performance.Comment: 20pages, 12 figure