Abstract:

Nowadays, there is an increasing concern for providing education and awareness regarding various hazards that induce potential vulnerabilities of rural and urban areas, like floods, earthquakes, severe pollution, or unpredictable accidents in the chemical and nuclear industries. Apart from the typical warnings and alerts, which sometimes reach their recipients quite late, an important progress may be obtained by developing educational and awareness platforms, to inform the general public and introduce people to basic notions regarding the hazards they are exposed to, and the typical response measures. This is expected to create preparedness not only at the level of the emergency personnel, but also among the potentially affected population, who may thus become more collaborative.

In this context, we applied Web 2.0 technologies and, starting from introductory educational materials for the third year students of Power Engineering, we developed a semantic wiki conceived for the apprehension of the large public; this was performed within a research project providing simulation and decision support tools for early warning and vulnerability assessment in case of radioactive clouds shifting under windy meteorological conditions. Although the expected character of this educational service is informal, the e-content was rigorously organized with respect to reference terms that are essential for understanding the domain of nuclear hazards, describing concepts about hazard evaluation, emergency management, organizational framework, and existing hazard management systems. These terms constitute the core knowledge that is necessary for creating public awareness, and they were formalized based on a standard language adopted by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) - OWL (Web Ontology Language). The result was the “Nuclear Watch” ontology, whose representation is not only useful for explicitly expressing the domain concepts, but may also be used within a computer program for verifying the consistency, the equivalence between classes, for further classifications and reasoning.

This paper is especially focused on presenting the correspondences between our “Nuclear Watch” terminology - used for organizing the wiki pages meant to support education and awareness, and focused on nuclear hazards – and more general terminologies introduced for standardized knowledge representation and interoperability. We used Protégé to map 22 of the “Nuclear Watch” classes to other domain ontologies also represented in OWL, i.e. “Disaster” (DiRes 1.0) and “VuWiki” (Vulnerability Ontology 1.0). “Disaster” was defined at Aston University, UK, to characterize events related to disasters and emergency, and to ensure interoperability between hazard management applications that are based on different terminologies. “VuWiki” was developed at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, offering a vocabulary for assessing vulnerabilities based on 50 empirical evaluations, performed over a large spectrum of disciplines.

Our purpose was to integrate the “Nuclear Watch” ontology, identified and represented in our project, into a more general context, by establishing mappings to other consecrated ontologies. Thus, apart from our specific semantic links, developed with Tiki Wiki according to “Nuclear Watch”, it is possible to enlarge the wiki search capabilities, on the basis of the relationships with more general concepts related to disaster and vulnerability issues.

Keywords:

Nuclear Hazards, Knowledge Management, Semantic Wiki.