Ontology-based Representation of Crisis Management Procedures for Climate Events

One of the most critical challenges faced by authorities during the management of a climate-related crisis is the overwhelming flow of heterogeneous information coming from humans and deployed sensors (e.g. cameras, temperature measurements, etc.), which has to be processed in order to filter meaningful items and provide crisis decision support. Towards addressing this challenge, ontologies can provide a semantically unified representation of the domain, along with superior capabilities in querying and information retrieval. Nevertheless, the recently proposed ontologies only cover subsets of the relevant concepts. This paper proposes a more “all-around” lightweight ontology for climate crisis management, which greatly facilitates decision support and merges several pertinent aspects: representation of a crisis, climate parameters that may cause climate crises, sensor analysis, crisis incidents and related impacts, first responder unit allocations. The ontology could constitute the backbone of the decision support systems for crisis management.