A preliminary study of the construction of ontology-based flood management systems

Flood, either flash flood or monsoon flood is one of the disasters that occur in Malaysia annually. A document called Directive 20 has been issued by the Malaysian Government to guide all related agencies to manage any disasters including flood, effectively. The aim is to promote coordination among the parties involved and to share any related flood information which may lead to a better decision making. However, problems related to coordination have not yet been solved due to lack of knowledge sharing among these agencies. The knowledge owned by these agencies is spread manually or captured and published in the agencies' own websites and has not been captured, classified and integrated into a proper information systems which can be used by all agencies. Thus, it is hard for the authority to make decisions quickly and effectively. This paper is a preliminary research in the construction of ontology-based flood management systems in order to improve the knowledge sharing process and allow any information systems to integrate with each other. The result of this research is a proposed list of terms suitable for flood management domain which will be used to construct flood ontology.