An ontology-based framework for heterogeneous data management and its application for urban flood disasters

Data are the foundation of urban storm and flood disaster management and research; therefore, the question of how to improve the efficiency of data management and service systems has become the central issue in the field of urban flood disasters. In this study, a data management framework for urban flood disasters was established on the basis of ontology engineering in order to analyze heterogeneous data collected from different sources. Based on the ontology framework, the concepts of data were extracted and classified, and the relationships between these concepts were also identified and determined. On the basis of the proposed framework, the complete and comprehensive flood disaster information for Zhengzhou City could be queried and retrieved. Finally, the impact indices of the factors influencing flood disasters were calculated using this ontology-based framework; thus, the factors that have the greatest impact on flood disasters were determined. The results show that rainfall duration and intensity have the greatest impact on flood disasters with impact indices of 0.99 and 0.93, respectively, while river density and slope have less influence, with an impact index not exceeding 0.1. The results provide a basis for the flood disaster data management and its application.