Towards a flood risk assessment ontology – Knowledge integration into a multi-criteria risk assessment approach

Flood risk management must rely on a proper and encompassing flood risk assessment, which possibly reflects the individual characteristics of all elements at risk of being flooded. In addition to prevalent expert knowledge, such an approach must also rely on local knowledge. In this context, stakeholder preferences for risk assessment indicators and assessment deliverables hold great importance but are often neglected. This paper proposes to put this body of information into operation in form of a knowledge base, thereby making it accessible and reusable in multi-criteria risk assessment. Selected use cases discuss the advantages of such a semantically enhanced assessment approach.

► We propose a new and innovative OWL ontology for flood risk assessment.
► The ontology semantically describes core flood risk concepts, tasks and map types.
► We explore the use of the ontology as basis for an assessment tool knowledge base.
► The ontology puts local knowledge into operation.
► The ontology allows for interdisciplinary research and knowledge exchange.