Ontology

Ontology

The systematic formalization of SILVANUS ontology is designed to represent all the semantic concepts which are relevant to the SILVANUS project. These cover the topics of fire, fire ignition causes, biodiversity, sensors, firefighting resources, entities vulnerable to fire and climate. The Ontology formalization has been carried out in consultation with the stakeholders and feedback from the participatory approaches have been considered, as outlined in SILVANUS Deliverable 2.1.

The Ontology schema allows for a consistent way of sharing and reusing knowledge: when shared by multiple users working in a domain, it allows them to communicate and act on the covered concepts without concerns about confusion and ambiguity. Moreover, it allows for the semantic fusion of heterogeneous data. When a situation calls for dealing with different type of data at the same time, an ontology allows not only for the correlation of these items and their characteristics together, but also for the inference of new knowledge from such correlations between the data: e.g., if during firefighting operations the wind condition rises above a certain threshold and changes in a certain direction, then alert firefighting units in a certain area and increase the fire dangerousness class. Finally, the Ontology has been built with interoperability with other ontologies in mind. All the reused concepts from other ontologies feature a loose connection to the class of the original ontology. This way it is possible to query for both silvanus:Class and originalOntology:Class individuals.

The Ontology and the accompanying documentation are available here.

Latest release date: 07/09/2023

Latest version: 1.1

For further details, please refer to Deliverable 3.1.