Supporting Global Knowledge Concerning Risk Domain: Ontologies Put into Practice

Developing strategies and solutions to cope with the increasing risks that populations constantly face has become essential to encourage effective preventive planning and prompt responses. In this regard, and from a more theoretical perspective, the relevance of developing a formal conceptualization of the world by linking concepts through logical rules to allow knowledge sharing is recognized as the primary purpose by the Authors. Users working in the same Risk domain, intended as a function of Hazard, Vulnerability, Exposure, and Adaptation (as a reducing factor), require a system of explicit representations that can reduce the conceptual and terminological confusion to have a shared interpretation. Therefore, ontologies are employed to overcome such issues. Ontologies can improve semantic interoperability by isolating the core concepts’ domain, defining relations among them, and providing hierarchically structured descriptions of the most important concepts and their properties. Thus, an ontology about the Risk domain has been built using the Protégé editor through some steps: identifying the main concepts related to the domain, organizing the concepts through a structured hierarchy that implements the IS_A relation, and finally specifying further possible relations existing among the inserted terms.