Terminological Ontologies for Risk and Vulnerability Analysis

Risk and vulnerability analyses are an important preliminary stage in civil contingency planning. The Danish Emergency Management Agency has developed a generic model and a set of tools that may be used in the preparedness planning, i.e. for identifying and describing society’s critical functions, for formulating threat scenarios and for assessing consequences. Terminological ontologies, which are systems of domain specific concepts comprising concept relations and characteristics, are useful, both when describing the central concepts of risk and vulnerability analysis (meta concepts), and for further structuring and enriching the taxonomies of society’s critical functions and threats, which form an important part of the model. Creating terminological ontologies is a time consuming work, and therefore there is a need for automatic tools for extraction of terms, concept relations and characteristics. Terminological ontologies must adhere to a number of constraints, and therefore tools for automatic validation of these ontologies are also needed. Methods and tools for automatic ontology construction are being developed by researchers at Copenhagen Business School. The tools developed may also be used for extracting information on disasters from various media, and
terminological ontologies may be used for enhancement of retrieval of information about disasters and for choosing the relevant countermeasures.