A qualitative knowledge representation model and application for crisis events

Emergency management information system requires lots of qualitative knowledge of crisis events, such as empirical knowledge, common-sense knowledge, etc., but as to the complexity of the crisis events, existing studies about qualitative knowledge have not formed systematic modeling method, and the knowledge representation model established cannot get personalized extension or their extendibility is not very well. In addition, relationships between any two crisis events cannot be supported and connected by the qualitative knowledge. Therefore, based on the system engineering point of view, this paper abstracts the common elements, that is, the ontology model of the evolutionary process of the crisis events, and creates the corresponding meta-model. Based on the above two models, by using framework structure and production rules, a personalized and extensible general qualitative knowledge representation model for crisis events is constructed, and then, according to the causal relationships between crisis events, the crisis events chain model which can realize the evolutionary process automatically is also constructed. Finally, a well-designed prototype system shows the application of the proposed model.