An Ontology and a reasoning approach for Evacuation in Flood Disaster Response

Abstract

International audienceManaging flood-related data to assist in the disaster management is a critical process of high importance during a flood disaster. These data are heterogeneous and can be provided from different data sources, and integrating them is a challenging task which allows to infer new information that helps in limiting the consequences of a flood. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that manages heterogeneous flood-related data based on semantic web techniques and helps in limiting the damage caused by floods. We first propose an ontology that is used to formally describe the flood-related data, and we build our knowledge graph through integrating heterogeneous data using the proposed ontology. Then, we propose a reasoning approach using SHACL rules to infer new information that helps in managing the flood disaster or in anticipating future events. The experimental evaluations of our proposed approach are conducted on a real case study in the frame of flood disaster management with the aim of generatingevacuation priorities. The results show that it succeeds in managing heterogeneous flood-related data and generating evacuation priorities in a very short time