Critical infrastructure security – a new ontology available for wildfires management

Critical infrastructure security – a new ontology available for wildfires management

Major accidents and disasters have their origins in a wide variety of natural phenomena as well as in technical-technological processes and represent a significant social and economic burden for all countries. Vegetation fires occur as a cause-and-effect relationship between climatic factors, the state of fuel material (humidity, types of plant cover and the amount of wood and other biomass) and human activity. This results in hard-to-compensate economic damages, critical infrastructure protection, large reconstruction costs and other indirect and direct losses. Such fires are the cause of disruption of biological and landscape diversity and contaminate the air in a narrow area, but also cause long-term damage through the emission of carbon dioxide. 

Figure 1 – Excerpt from Wildfires Ontology  

Forest fires, in addition to all the above, can have an impact on the perception of the global security of the country (especially countries that are popular tourist destinations). Thus, the elements of the entire protection system (preventive and operational) gain importance in the future and must have a development priority. Surely the basis for thinking about reducing the risk of forest fires is the creation of risk assessments in accordance with international guidelines to ensure quality and mutual compliance/comparability. 

Risk assessment is primarily the determination of quantitative and/or qualitative risk values, and the risk of forest fires is evaluated more closely. All participants at the national, regional and local level should participate in this process, and the document should specify the basic characteristics of the area, identification of threats and risks, criteria of social values ​​for determining the impact on people’s lives and health, economy and social stability and politics, probability/frequency tables, scenarios for wildfires (with the worst possible consequences), matrices for the results of risk assessment, risk evaluation and mapping of forest fire risk. In the field of complex domains such as wildfire management the design of a comprehensive ontology plays a vital role​. A new ontology was designed within the SILVANUS research project by Expert.ai, the ontology is freely available at this link https://silvanus-project.eu/results/resources/ontology/   

 

Author(s): Vincenzo Masucci, Expert.ai

Links:

Silvanus project website, Ontology, https://silvanus-project.eu/results/resources/ontology/  (Accessed on 29.09.2023)