An Ontology and a Reasoning Approach for Evacuation in Flood Disaster Response

Managing flood-related data to assist in the disaster management is a critical process of high importance during a flood disaster. These data are heterogeneous and can be provided from different data sources, and integrating them is a challenging task which allows inferring new information that helps in limiting the consequences of a flood. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that manages heterogeneous flood-related data based on semantic web techniques and helps in limiting the damage caused by floods. We first propose an ontology that is used to formally describe the flood-related data, and we construct our knowledge graph through integrating heterogeneous data using the proposed ontology. Then, we propose a reasoning approach using SHACL rules to infer new information that helps manage the flood disaster or anticipate future events. The experimental evaluations of our proposed approach are conducted on a real case study in flood disaster management with the aim of generating evacuation priorities. The results show that the proposed approach succeeds in managing heterogeneous flood-related data and in generating evacuation priorities in a very short time.