Highlights: What are the main findings? The TERMINUS ontology provides a BFO (Basic Formal Ontology)-aligned semantic framework structured around ontology design patterns (ODPs) and ontology query patterns (OQPs), ensuring semantic continuity across the crisis management lifecycle. The ontology enables automated risk assessment, cascading risk analysis, emergency scenario generation, and participatory recovery planning, validated through real-world applications in Rome and L’Aquila. What are the implications of the main findings? TERMINUS enhances interoperability and reuse of knowledge graphs in crisis management, supporting more effective prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery in smart cities. The ontology fosters collaborative decision-making and resilience building by providing actionable, pattern-based semantic structures that bridge conceptual models with operational applications. Crisis management in smart cities demands coherent, interoperable, and reusable semantic models to represent complex systems, their risks, crisis situations, interdependencies, and decision-making processes across all lifecycle phases, i.e., prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. This paper presents the TERMINUS (TERritorial Management and INfrastructures ontology for institutional and industrial USage) ontology, a BFO (Basic Formal Ontology)-aligned conceptual model based on semantic patterns for the crisis management lifecycle operationalized as both ontology design patterns (ODPs) to structure the ontology and ontology query patterns (OQPs) to use it in specific contexts. ODPs capture reusable conceptual structures for modeling domains, while OQPs provide SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language)-based templates to retrieve and reason over knowledge graph instances derived from these model chunks. The approach ensures semantic continuity from conceptual modeling to operational applications, enabling automated scenario generation, cascading risk analysis, and participatory decision-making. We position the patterns within the crisis management lifecycle and demonstrate their use through real-world case studies, covering semantic spatio-temporal risk assessment, interdependent infrastructure risk cascades, creative emergency scenario design, and recovery planning. Evaluation results highlight the ontology’s ability to support domain experts in generating plausible context-specific models, fostering collaborative validation, and enhancing preparedness and resilience. TERMINUS thus provides a versatile and interoperable semantic infrastructure for integrating ontologies and knowledge graphs into urban crisis management workflows.
Actionable Semantic Patterns in the Crisis Management Lifecycle: The TERMINUS Ontology
De Nicola A.;Villani M. L.
2025-01-01
Abstract
Highlights: What are the main findings? The TERMINUS ontology provides a BFO (Basic Formal Ontology)-aligned semantic framework structured around ontology design patterns (ODPs) and ontology query patterns (OQPs), ensuring semantic continuity across the crisis management lifecycle. The ontology enables automated risk assessment, cascading risk analysis, emergency scenario generation, and participatory recovery planning, validated through real-world applications in Rome and L’Aquila. What are the implications of the main findings? TERMINUS enhances interoperability and reuse of knowledge graphs in crisis management, supporting more effective prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery in smart cities. The ontology fosters collaborative decision-making and resilience building by providing actionable, pattern-based semantic structures that bridge conceptual models with operational applications. Crisis management in smart cities demands coherent, interoperable, and reusable semantic models to represent complex systems, their risks, crisis situations, interdependencies, and decision-making processes across all lifecycle phases, i.e., prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. This paper presents the TERMINUS (TERritorial Management and INfrastructures ontology for institutional and industrial USage) ontology, a BFO (Basic Formal Ontology)-aligned conceptual model based on semantic patterns for the crisis management lifecycle operationalized as both ontology design patterns (ODPs) to structure the ontology and ontology query patterns (OQPs) to use it in specific contexts. ODPs capture reusable conceptual structures for modeling domains, while OQPs provide SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language)-based templates to retrieve and reason over knowledge graph instances derived from these model chunks. The approach ensures semantic continuity from conceptual modeling to operational applications, enabling automated scenario generation, cascading risk analysis, and participatory decision-making. We position the patterns within the crisis management lifecycle and demonstrate their use through real-world case studies, covering semantic spatio-temporal risk assessment, interdependent infrastructure risk cascades, creative emergency scenario design, and recovery planning. Evaluation results highlight the ontology’s ability to support domain experts in generating plausible context-specific models, fostering collaborative validation, and enhancing preparedness and resilience. TERMINUS thus provides a versatile and interoperable semantic infrastructure for integrating ontologies and knowledge graphs into urban crisis management workflows.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
