Using semantic technologies to resolve heterogeneity issues in sustainability and disaster management knowledge bases
Creators: name: Ghahremanlou, Lida
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 461008
subject: Organisation of information and knowledge resources
classificationCode: 461207
subject: Software quality, processes and metrics

description: This thesis examines issues of semantic heterogeneity in the domains of sustainability indicators and disaster management. We propose a model that links two domains with the following logic. While disaster management implies a proper and efficient response to a risk that has materialised as a disaster, sustainability can be defined as the preparedness to unexpected situations by applying measurements such as sustainability indicators. As a step to this direction, we investigate how semantic technologies can tackle the issues of heterogeneity in the aforementioned domains. <br><br>First, we consider approaches to resolve the heterogeneity issues of representing the key concepts of sustainability indicator sets. To develop a knowledge base, we apply the METHONTOLOGY approach to guide the construction of two ontology design candidates: generic and specic. Of the two, the generic design is more abstract, with fewer classes and properties. Documents describing two indicator systems - the Global Reporting Initiative and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - are used in the design of both candidate ontologies. We then evaluate both ontology designs using the ROMEO approach, to calculate their level of coverage against the seen indicators, as well as against an unseen third indicator set (the United Nations Statistics Division). We also show that use of existing structured approaches like METHONTOLOGY and ROMEO can reduce ambiguity in ontology design and evaluation for domain-level ontologies. It is concluded that where an ontology needs to be designed for both seen and unseen indicator systems, a generic and reusable design is preferable.<br><br>Second, having addressed the heterogeneity issues at the data level of sustainability indicators in the first phase of the research, we then develop a software for a sustainability reporting framework - Circles of Sustainability - which provides two mechanisms for browsing heterogeneous sustainability indicator sets: a Tabular view and a Circular view. In particular, the generic design of ontology developed during the first phase of the research is applied to this software. Next, we evaluate the overall usefulness and ease of use for the presented software and the associated user interfaces by conducting a user study. The analysis of quantitative and qualitative results of the user study concludes that the Circular view is the preferred interface by most participants for browsing semantic heterogeneous indicators. <br><br>Third, in the context of disaster management, we present a geotagger method for the OzCrisisTracker application that automatically detects and disambiguates the heterogeneity of georeferences mentioned in the tweets' content with three possibilities: definite, ambiguous and no-location. Our method semantically annotates the tweet components utilising existing and new ontologies. We also concluded that the accuracy of geographic focus of our geotagger is considerably higher than other systems.<br><br>From a more general perspective the research contributions can be articulated as follows. The knowledge bases developed in this research have been applied to the two domain applications. The thesis therefore demonstrates how semantic technologies, such as ontology design patterns, browsing tools and geocoding, can untangle data representation and navigation issues of semantic heterogeneity in sustainability and disaster management domains.