A Systematic Analysis of Flood Ontologies: A Parametric Approach

Abstract

The article identifies the core literature available on flood ontologies and presents a review on these ontologies from various perspectives like its purpose, type, design methodologies, ontologies (re)used, and also their focus on specific flood disaster phases. The study was conducted in two stages: i) literature identification, where the systematic literature review methodology was employed; and, ii) ontological review, where the parametric approach was applied. The study resulted in a set of fourteen papers discussing the flood ontology (FO). The ontological review revealed that most of the flood ontologies were task ontologies, formal, modular, and used web ontology language (OWL) for their representation. The most (re)used ontologies were SWEET, SSN, Time, and Space. METHONTOLOGY was the preferred design methodology, and for evaluation, application-based or data-based approaches were preferred. The majority of the ontologies were built around the response phase of the disaster. The unavailability of the full ontologies somewhat restricted the current study as the structural ontology metrics are missing. But the scientific community, the developers, of flood disaster management systems can refer to this work for their research to see what is available in the literature on flood ontology and the other major domains essential in building the FO.