Documenting flooding areas calculation: a PROV approach

Abstract

Flooding events related to waste-lake dam ruptures are one of the most threatening natural disasters in Brazil. They must be managed in advance by public institutions through the use of adequate hydrographic and environmental information. Although the Open Data paradigm offers an opportunity to share hydrographic data sets, their actual reuse is still low because of metadata quality. Our previous work highlighted a lack of detailed provenance information. The paper presents an Open Data approach to improve the release of hydrographic data sets. We discuss a methodology, based on W3C recommendations, for documenting the provenance of hydrographic data sets, considering the workflow activities related to the study of flood areas caused by the waste-lakes breakdowns. We provide an illustrative example that documents, through W3C PROV metadata model, the generation of flooding area maps by integrating land use classification, from Sentinel images, with hydrographic data sets produced by the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research.