Technical Report 308, c4e-Preprint Series, Cambridge

Authors: Markus Hofmeister, George Brownbridge, Michael Hillman, Sebastian Mosbach, Jethro Akroyd, Kok Foong Lee, and Markus Kraft*

Reference: Technical Report 308, c4e-Preprint Series, Cambridge, 2023

Associated Themes:
 

• Dynamic integration of previously isolated yet related complementary data sources.
• Provision of holistic cross-domain perspective on potential flooding impacts.
• Fully automated updates of outdated information to ensure up-to-date insights.
• Single system to provide both tactical and strategic risk assessments.
• Unified visualisation interface to support evidence-based decision making.

This paper investigates the usage of knowledge graphs to bridge the gap between current data silos in deriving a holistic perspective on the impact of flooding. It builds on the idea of connected digital twins based on the World Avatar dynamic knowledge graph to deploy an ecosystem of autonomous software agents to continuously ingest new real-world information and operate on it. Multiple publicly available yet isolated data sources, including geospatial building information and property sales data as well as real-time river levels, weather observations, and flood warnings, are connected to instantiate a semantically rich ecosystem of knowledge, data, and computational capabilities to provide cross-domain insights in projected flooding events and their potential impact on population and built infrastructure. The extensibility of the proposed approach is highlighted by further integrating power, water, and telecoms infrastructure as part of the very same system, in order to analyse flood-induced asset failures and their propagation across networks. The World Avatar promotes evidence-based decision making during several disaster management phases, supporting both tactical and strategic risk assessments, which supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11 to improve the assessment of vulnerability, exposure, and risk of communities imposed by flooding events.

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