The development of integrated watershed flood risk assessment ontology

Floods belong to the most threatening natural hazards for human society and economics, and are enhanced by urbanization and climate change. Integrated assessment is defined as an interdisciplinary and participatory process of combining, integration, interpreting, and communicating knowledge from diverse scientific disciplines to allow a better understanding of complex phenomena. Ontology, as a formal knowledge representation, will provide methods for the interdisciplinary integrated flood assessment. This paper will develop integrated watershed flood risk assessment ontology from different perceptual models of watershed flood risk. First, different conceptual models, such as Pressure-State-Impact-Response model, are introduced. Then the development framework of ontology is given. The flood risk assessment ontology is designed based on the upper level ontology of Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET). Finally the rainfall excess indicator computing ontology and vulnerability index computing ontology were given as the examples of application development.