Enhancing Interoperability and Inferring Evacuation Priorities in Flood Disaster Response

Abstract

Disaster management is a crucial process that aims at limiting the consequences of a natural disaster. Disaster-related data, that are heterogeneous and multi-source, should be shared among different actors involved in the management process to enhance the interoperability. In addition, they can be used for inferring new information that helps in decision making. The evacuation process of flood victims during a flood disaster is critical and should be simple, rapid and efficient to ensure the victims’ safety. In this paper, we present an ontology that allows integrating and sharing flood-related data to various involved actors and updating these data in real time throughout the flood. Furthermore, we propose using the ontology to infer new information representing evacuation priorities of places impacted by the flood using semantic reasoning to assist in the disaster management process. The evaluation results show that it is efficient for enhancing information interoperability as well as for inferring evacuation priorities.