Semantic web and seismic risk: beyond BIM for prevention

The process of knowledge for the prevention of seismic risk in settlements is aimed at the global understanding of the material and immaterial values ​​underlying the urban fabric’s aggregative processes.The resulting data are rather varied and complex, as well as with heterogeneous formats, so they need a virtuous systematization to be suitable for the exchange of information between the figures involved in prevention activities. In response to these needs, the workflow proposed intends to exploit the qualities of relational databases, and in particular of BIM systems, where parametric models, interconnected according to constructive and ontological rules, are containers of related information, which succeed in to describe, more or less completely, the architectural organisms through the semantic decomposition of the elements that constitute them. However, the limits imposed by current software, especially those concerning the type of information that you can associate with digital objects, impose the need to implement existing procedures through the potential of other systems (VPL and semantic web), thanks to which conjugate complex form’s modeling with the semantic recognizability of the elements and a high Level of Information. The workflow proposed here has as its output a complex hyper-model, which becomes the basis for the development of effective strategies for the prevention and preservation of the vital components of urban centers at risk.