VuWiki: An Ontology-Based Semantic Wiki for Vulnerability Assessments

Three decades of vulnerability research have generated a complex and growing body of knowledge. The concept of vulnerability, as well as its implementation in vulnerability assessments, is used in various disciplines and contexts. Correspondingly, a multitude of ideas and frameworks about how to conceptualize and measure vulnerability exists. To provide a structured representation of vulnerability, we have set up an ontology-based semantic wiki for reviewing and representing vulnerability assessments (www.vuwiki.org). Based on a survey of 55 vulnerability assessment studies, we first developed an ontology as an explicit reference system for describing vulnerability assessments. The ontology was then implemented in a semantic wiki which allows for the classification and annotation of vulnerability assessment. The resulting semantic wiki, VuWiki, does not aim at “synthesizing” a holistic and overarching model of vulnerability, but at (1) providing—both scientists and practitioners—with a uniform ontology as a reference system; (2) providing easy and structured access to the knowledge field of vulnerability assessments with the possibility for any user to retrieve assessments using specific research criteria; and (3) serving as a collaborative knowledge platform that allows for the active participation of those generating and using the knowledge represented in the vulnerability wiki.

[1]  S. Cutter,et al.  Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Disaster Resilience Indicators for Benchmarking Baseline Conditions , 2011 .

[2]  medolbec.  Linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity , 2010 .

[3]  Thomas R. Gruber,et al.  A Translation Approach to Portable Ontologies , 1993 .

[4]  M. Vighi,et al.  Ecological vulnerability in risk assessment--a review and perspectives. , 2010, The Science of the total environment.

[5]  S. Cutter.  Vulnerability to environmental hazards , 1996 .

[6]  Roger Few,et al.  Climatic hazards, health risk and response in Vietnam: Case studies on social dimensions of vulnerability , 2010 .

[7]  Kwabena Asante,et al.  Estimating least-developed countries’ vulnerability to climate-related extreme events over the next 50 years , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[8]  Omar D. Cardona,et al.  The Need for Rethinking the Concepts of Vulnerability and Risk from a Holistic Perspective: A Necessary Review and Criticism for Effective Risk Management , 2013 .

[9]  M. Merz,et al.  An integrated indicator framework for spatial assessment of industrial and social vulnerability to indirect disaster losses , 2013, Natural Hazards.

[10]  Gunter Zeug,et al.  Remote sensing-based assessment of tsunami vulnerability and risk in Alexandria, Egypt , 2012 .

[11]  Gregory Giuliani,et al.  Sharing Environmental Data through GEOSS , 2011, Int. J. Appl. Geospat. Res..

[12]  W. L. Shirley,et al.  Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards , 2003 .

[13]  Julie A. Silva,et al.  The vulnerability context of a savanna area in Mozambique: household drought coping strategies and responses to economic change , 2009 .

[14]  Michael Smithson,et al.  Ignorance and Science , 1993 .

[15]  Johan Rockström,et al.  Reducing hazard vulnerability: towards a common approach between disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation. , 2006, Disasters.

[16]  J. St Cyr,et al.  Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management At Risk : Natural Hazards , People ' s Vulnerability , and Disasters , 2011 .

[17]  Gabi Hufschmidt,et al.  A comparative analysis of several vulnerability concepts , 2011 .

[18]  Paolo Franchin,et al.  Quantitative assessment of social losses based on physical damage and interaction with infrastructural systems , 2012 .

[19]  Paul D. H. Hines,et al.  Survivability and Reciprocal Altruism: Two Strategies for Intelligent Infrastructure with Applications to Power Grids , 2010 .

[20]  A. Fekete,et al.  Validation of a social vulnerability index in context to river-floods in Germany. , 2009 .

[21]  S. Cutter,et al.  Disaster Resilience Indicators for , 2010 .

[22]  Marc Zebisch,et al.  Assessing adaptive capacity within regional climate change vulnerability studies—an Alpine example , 2013, Natural Hazards.

[23]  K. Hewitt.  Interpretations of Calamity , 1984 .

[24]  H. Maibom.  Social Systems , 2007 .

[25]  Robert G. Raskin,et al.  Knowledge representation in the semantic web for Earth and environmental terminology (SWEET) , 2005, Comput. Geosci..

[26]  Barbara Tufty,et al.  At War with the Weather , 1966 .

[27]  Ian Burton,et al.  The hazardousness of a place: A regional ecology of damaging events , 1971 .

[28]  M. Pelling.  The Vulnerability of Cities: Natural Disasters and Social Resilience , 2005 .

[29]  Robert W. Kates,et al.  The Interaction of Climate and Society , 1985 .

[30]  Markus Krötzsch,et al.  Semantic Wikipedia , 2006, WikiSym '06.

[31]  B. Wisner,et al.  At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters , 1996 .

[32]  Iuliana Armaş,et al.  Social vulnerability and seismic risk perception. Case study: the historic center of the Bucharest Municipality/Romania , 2008 .

[33]  Markus Krötzsch,et al.  Semantic Wikipedia , 2007, WWW '06.

[34]  W. Adger,et al.  The determinants of vulnerability and adaptive capacity at the national level and the implications f , 2005 .

[35]  G. Grünthal.  European macroseismic scale 1998 : EMS-98 , 1998 .

[36]  Tomas Hellström,et al.  Critical infrastructure and systemic vulnerability: Towards a planning framework , 2007 .

[37]  M. L. Carreño,et al.  Framing vulnerability, risk and societal responses: the MOVE framework , 2013, Natural Hazards.

[38]  Suzanne Lacasse,et al.  Quantitative vulnerability estimation for scenario-based landslide hazards , 2010 .

[39]  Stefan Lang,et al.  Spatial vulnerability units – expert-based spatial modelling of socio-economic vulnerability in the Salzach catchment, Austria , 2009 .

[40]  Janos J. Bogardi,et al.  Vulnerability assessment : the first step towards sustainable risk reduction , 2005 .

[41]  C. Ranci,et al.  Social Vulnerability: A Multidimensional Analysis , 2010 .

[42]  Katrin Weller,et al.  Ontoverse : Collaborative Ontology Engineering for the Life Sciences , 2008 .

[43]  Wolfgang Rauch,et al.  Spatial risk assessment for critical network infrastructure using sensitivity analysis , 2011 .

[44]  Michel Bruneau,et al.  A Framework to Quantitatively Assess and Enhance the Seismic Resilience of Communities , 2003 .

[45]  Catherine Faron-Zucker,et al.  SweetWiki: A semantic wiki , 2008, J. Web Semant..

[46]  N. Luhmann,et al.  Globalization or World society: How to conceive of modern society? , 1997 .

[47]  Thomas R. Gruber,et al.  A translation approach to portable ontology specifications , 1993 .

[48]  L. Bertalanffy.  AN OUTLINE OF GENERAL SYSTEM THEORY , 1950, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

[49]  G. Gallopin.  Linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity , 2006 .

[50]  Vladimir Kotov,et al.  Assessing institutionalized capacities and practices to reduce the risks of flood disaster , 2006 .

[51]  Jim W Hall,et al.  Imprecise probability assessment of tipping points in the climate system , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[52]  Ilan Kelman,et al.  River flood vulnerability in Norway through the pressure and release model , 2010 .

[53]  Howard C. Kunreuther,et al.  of Pennsylvania, co-director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center and co-author of Learning from Catastrophes: Strategies for Reaction and Response and At War with the Weather: Managing Large Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes. , 2009 .

[54]  Hans-Martin Füssel,et al.  Vulnerability: A generally applicable conceptual framework for climate change research , 2007 .

[55]  Swen Zehetmair,et al.  Societal Aspects of Vulnerability to Natural Hazards , 2012 .

[56]  Jacquleen Joseph,et al.  Measuring vulnerability to natural hazards: a macro framework. , 2013, Disasters.

[57]  W. Adger,et al.  Social Vulnerability to Climate Change and the Architecture of Entitlements , 1999 .

[58]  W. Adger,et al.  THEORY AND PRACTICE IN ASSESSING VULNERABILITY TO CLIMATE CHANGE AND FACILITATING ADAPTATION , 2000 .

[59]  Amy Luers,et al.  Illustrating the coupled human–environment system for vulnerability analysis: Three case studies , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[60]  T. Downing,et al.  Climate change and social vulnerability: Toward a sociology and geography of food insecurity , 1994 .

[61]  Timothy W. Collins,et al.  Vulnerability to environmental hazards in the Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)–El Paso (USA) metropolis: A model for spatial risk assessment in transnational context , 2009 .

[62]  Jerry T. Mitchell,et al.  Revealing the Vulnerability of People and Places: A Case Study of Georgetown County, South Carolina , 2000 .

[63]  Federica Ranghieri,et al.  Climate resilient cities : a primer on reducing vulnerabilities to disasters - Singapore , 2009 .

[64]  Cory P. Knobel,et al.  Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design , 2007 .

[65]  Claudia Bach,et al.  Tools for Resilience Building and Adaptive Spatial Governance Challenges for Spatial and Urban Planning in Dealing with Vulnerability , 2022 .

[66]  W. Luppold,et al.  The Determinants of , 1985 .

[67]  M. L. Carreño,et al.  Urban Seismic Risk Evaluation: A Holistic Approach , 2007 .

[68]  W. Adger.  Social Vulnerability to Climate Change and Extremes in Coastal Vietnam , 1999 .

[69]  池谷 壽夫,et al.  Vulnerability: reflections on a new ethical foundation for law and politics , 2013 .

[70]  Wolfgang Lucht,et al.  Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[71]  Enrico Zio,et al.  Vulnerable Systems , 2011 .

[72]  W. Adger,et al.  Theory and Practice in Assessing Vulnerability to Climate Change andFacilitating Adaptation , 2000 .

[73]  Lynn P. Nygaard,et al.  Mapping vulnerability to multiple stressors: climate change and globalization in India , 2004 .

[74]  Burton Al.  The environment as hazard , 1978 .

[75]  B. Wisner,et al.  Taking the naturalness out of natural disasters , 1976, Nature.

[76]  D. Ball.  Regions of Risk: a Geographical Introduction to Disasters , 1998 .

[77]  S. Cutter,et al.  Erosion Hazard Vulnerability of US Coastal Counties , 2005 .

[78]  Amy Luers,et al.  Assessing the Vulnerability of Social-Environmental Systems , 2006 .

[79]  T. Stocker,et al.  Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. A Special Report of Working Groups I and II of IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , 2012 .

[80]  Anne M. Riederer,et al.  The Livelihood Vulnerability Index: A pragmatic approach to assessing risks from climate variability and change—A case study in Mozambique , 2009 .

[81]  Brent Yarnal,et al.  Vulnerability of coastal communities to sea-level rise: a case study of Cape May County, New Jersey, USA , 2002 .

[82]  Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler,et al.  Public sector financial vulnerability to disasters: The IIASA CATSIM model , 2012 .