OntoFire: an ontology-based geo-portal for wildfires

Abstract

Abstract.With the proliferation of the geospatial technologies on the Internet, the role of geo-portals (i.e. gateways to Spatial Data Infrastructures) in the area of wildfires management emerges. However, keyword-based techniques often frustrate users when looking for data of interest in geo-portal environments, while little attention has been paid to shift from the conventional keyword-based to navigation-based mechanisms. The presented OntoFire system is an ontologybased geo-portal about wildfires. Through the proposed navigation mechanisms, the relationships between the data can be discovered, which would otherwise not be possible when using conventional querying techniques alone. End users can use the browsing interface to find resources of interest by using the navigation mechanisms provided. Data providers can use the publishing interface to submit new metadata, modify metadata or removing metadata in/from the catalogue. The proposed approach can improve the discovery of valuable information that is necessary to set priorities for disaster mitigation and prevention strategies. OntoFire aspires to be a focal point of integration and management of a very large amount of information, contributing in this way to the dissemination of knowledge and to the preparedness of the operational stakeholders.

An ontology for sharing and managing information in disaster response: An illustrative case study of flood evacuation

“…These ontologies are designed for enhancing situation awareness within a specific context of humanitarian and disaster relief operations. Reference [28] proposed an ontology, named OntoFire, which is developed specifically for the wildfires domain, with the aim to improve information retrieval mechanisms of geo-portals by enabling a semantic-based search for geoinformational resources of interest. Reference [29] proposed a case attribute domain ontology which is used to support case-based reasoning approaches in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of decision making in responding to a disaster situation.…”

Crowdsourcing Tools for Disaster Management: A Review of Platforms and Methods

“…A review of situational awareness ontologies is provided in [48], and proposals to formalize the basic components of situation awareness in an ontology can also be found in [49,50]. Further ontological approaches to disaster management can be found in [51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62]. Liu, Brewster and Shaw [63] offer a comprehensive review of 26 ontologies.…”

A Systematic Review of Ontology-Based River Streamflow and Flood Data Management Challenges

“…The ontology models based on the information extracted from the correlating domains provides even better results by integrating reusable ontologies of the SWEET suit, especially for the forest, vegetation, weather, and geographic domain to cover fire [2]. Our research emphasize on technical studies on the use of an ontology-based system for water governance [3], flood risk assessment [4], flood information management [5], indexed in academic databases for semantic modeling.…”