A spatio-temporal ontological model for flood disaster monitoring

During an extreme event such as flood disaster, it is important to study flood inundation and receding patterns to understand the dynamic spatio-temporal behavior of flood. In addition to the general change detection techniques in RS, a proper conceptualization of ‘change’ during flood disaster is necessary to model its dynamic behavior. This motivated the development of Ontology, which is able to capture the dynamically evolving phenomenon. This Ontology is envisaged as a precursor for developing applications that integrate the spatio-temporal dimensions of a dynamically evolving system such as floods. This paper describes the conceptual framework that was developed to address the same.