An ontology framework for flooding forecasting

Floods can cause significant damage and disruption as they often affect highly urbanized areas. The capability of knowledge using and sharing is the main reason why the ontologies are suited for supporting the phases of forecasting in (near-) real time disastrous flooding events and managing the flooding alert and emergency. This research work develops an ontology, FloodOntology for floods forecasting based on continuous measurements of water parameters gathered in the watersheds and in the sewers and simulation models. Concepts are captured across the main involved domains i.e. hydrological/ hydraulic domains and SN-based monitoring domain. Classes hierarchies, properties and semantic constraints are defined related to all involved entities, obtaining a structured and unified knowledge-base on the flooding risk forecasting, to be integrated in expert systems. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.