Rule-Based Actionable Intelligence for Disaster Situation Management

Abstract

Managing natural disasters is a social responsibility as they might cause a gloomy impact on human life. Efficient and timely alert systems for public and actionable recommendations for decision makers may well decrease the number of casualties. Web semantics strengthen the description of web resources for exploiting them better and making them more meaningful for both human and machine. In this work, the authors propose a semantic rule-based approach for disaster situation management (DSM) to reach the next level of decision-making power and its architecture for providing actionable intelligence in the domain of the earthquake. The system itself is based on a data pre-processing layer, a computation layer, and the middle layer relies on an extensive rule base of experts' advice stored over time and a disaster ontology along with its inherent semantics. The rule-based reasoning approach uses this knowledge base in combination with the expert rule base, written in SWRL rules, to infer recommendations for the response to an earthquake.