Risk assessment of urban areas aims at limiting the impact of harmful events by increasing awareness of their possible consequences. Qualitative risk assessment allows to figure out possible risk situations and to prioritize them, whereas quantitative risk assessment is devoted to measuring risks from data, in order to improve preparedness in case of crisis situations. We propose an automatic approach to comprehensive risk assessment. This leverages on a semantic and spatiotemporal representation of knowledge of the urban area and relies on a software system including: a knowledge base; two components for quantitative and qualitative risk assessments, respectively; and a WebGIS interface. The knowledge base consists of the TERMINUS domain ontology, to represent urban knowledge, and of a geo‐referenced database, including geographical, environmental and urban data as well as temporal data related to the levels of operation of city services. CIPcast DSS is the component devoted to quantitative risk assessment, and WS‐CREAM is the component supporting qualitative risk assessment based on computational creativity techniques. Two case studies concerning the city of Rome (Italy) show how this approach can be used in a real scenario for crisis preparedness. Finally, we discuss issues related to plausibility of risks and objectivity of their assessment.

中文翻译：

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城市风险语义时空评估的综合系统

城市地区的风险评估旨在通过提高人们对有害事件可能产生的后果的认识，来限制有害事件的影响。定性风险评估可以找出可能的风险情况并确定其优先级，而定量风险评估致力于测量数据中的风险，以提高在发生危机情况下的防范能力。我们提出了一种自动方法来进行全面的风险评估。这利用了市区知识的语义和时空表示，并依赖于以下软件系统：知识库；定量和定性风险评估的两个组成部分；和WebGIS界面。知识库包括代表城市知识的TERMINUS领域本体，以及一个地理参考数据库，其中包括地理，环境和城市数据以及与城市服务运营水平相关的时间数据。CIPcast DSS是致力于量化风险评估的组件，WS‐CREAM是支持基于计算创新技术的定性风险评估的组件。关于罗马市（意大利）的两个案例研究表明，如何在实际情况下使用这种方法进行危机防范。最后，我们讨论了与风险的合理性及其评估的客观性有关的问题。