FFO: Forest Fire Ontology and Reasoning System for Enhanced Alert and Management Services

Abstract

Forest fires or wildfires pose a serious threat to property, lives, and the environment. Early detection and mitigation of such emergencies, therefore, play an important role in reducing the severity of the impact caused by wildfire. Unfortunately, there is often an improper or delayed mechanism for forest fire detection which leads to destruction and losses. These anomalies in detection can be due to defects in sensors or a lack of proper information interoperability among the sensors deployed in forests. This paper presents a lightweight ontological framework to address these challenges. Interoperability issues are caused due to heterogeneity in technologies used and heterogeneous data created by different sensors. Therefore, through the proposed Forest Fire Detection and Management Ontology (FFO), we introduce a standardized model to share and reuse knowledge and data across different sensors. The proposed ontology is validated using semantic reasoning and query processing. The reasoning and querying processes are performed on real-time data gathered from experiments conducted in a forest and stored as RDF triples based on the design of the ontology. The outcomes of queries and inferences from reasoning demonstrate that FFO is feasible for the early detection of wildfire and facilitates efficient process management subsequent to detection.