Modeling and representation for earthquake emergency response knowledge: perspective for working with geo-ontology

Abstract

Earthquake emergency response is one of the three earthquake disaster mitigation work systems in China, already achieving good results in some earthquake disaster mitigation situations. Earthquake emergency plans and emergency command systems are among the most important research and operations components of emergency response. These components commonly come with challenges, such as the pertinence of emergency commands and the operability of the countermeasures to be improved. The promise for solving this problem resides with applying knowledge that aids intelligence creation for decision-making. In this paper, we put forward a conceptual model of knowledge for earthquake disaster emergency response (EDER); compositions of EDER knowledge are introduced within architecture. A modeling method incorporating geo-ontology is used to build basic modeling primitives. Geo-ontology serves to represent geospatial characteristics of the EDER knowledge and addresses a need for semantic interoperability in the modeling process. A decision problem framework and a case study have been used as theoretical framework and an application test, respectively, to evaluate the EDER knowledge architecture and models. The EDER knowledge model provides a foundation for intelligent emergency response that helps solve knowledge problems to improve earthquake disaster response.

Keywords:

• geo-ontology
• knowledge modeling
• knowledge representation
• earthquake disaster emergency response

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to express their appreciation to the editor and the referees for their comments and suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported in part by grants from the National Key Technology R&D Program of China [Grant No. 2012BAK15B06], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 40901272], Jiangsu Overseas Research & Training Program for University Prominent Young & Middle-aged Teachers and Presidents and Open Fund of Hunan Province Engineering Laboratory of Geospatial Information (2013GSIJJ010).