Knowledge-based Education and Awareness about the Radiological

and Nuclear Hazards

Anca Daniela Ionita

, Adriana Olteanu

and Radu Nicolae Pietraru

University Politehnica of Bucharest, Spl. Independentei 313, 060042, Bucharest, Romania

Keywords: Knowledge Representation, Rule-based Systems, Education and Training.

Abstract: There are multiple approaches to organize and formalize the knowledge related to nuclear accidents,

emergency situations and management of hazards. However, in general, the materials available for

educational and awareness purposes are not directly linked to an organized knowledge base. This paper shows

our studies on representing and using the experts’ knowledge on radiological and nuclear risks, with the

purpose of making it more accessible to junior students and to other interested stakeholders. This effort

resulted in an ontology of nuclear vulnerabilities, a set of rules, and processes for prevention, protection and

emergency response, useful for understanding the decisions made by responsible institutions. These

representations were applied in the development of a platform for informal education and awareness.

1 INTRODUCTION

All over the world, government agencies, local

officials, nuclear plant owners and other stakeholders

are directly interested in creating education and

awareness about the radiological and nuclear hazards.

This concern was also present in the key messages

launched in 2013 by the International Federation of

Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRCRCS) to

increase public awareness and public education for

disaster risk reduction.

The occurrence of severe nuclear accidents in

Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as the problems

raised by radioactive waste, have increased the

general concern on nuclear power plants safety, up to

discussing the acceptance by the large public of this

form of producing energy (Bing et al., 2013). Apart

from establishing and maintaining radiation

protection measures in nuclear power plants, there are

also issues like environment protection, climate

change and potential conflicts between technological

and social development, leading to the analysis of the

people’s risk awareness. Thus, the studies show that

safety goals and public acceptance have a direct

impact on each other (Li et al, 2012). Whereas the

geographic proximity to a nuclear facility influences

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8966-6196

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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6986-5163

the interest towards the nuclear energy and the

awareness of the induced vulnerabilities, it has not

been proven to be an important factor in the

acceptance of its usage (Cale and Kromer, 2015).

However, the attitude changes for the population

living in the vulnerability area of a former nuclear

accident. Kitada (2016) analysed the results of

multiple surveys realized in Japan, before and after

the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident.

After the event, the negative opinions about nuclear

power increased; people were discussing more about

renewable energies and tended to focus on the

accident risks. The perception of nuclear energy risks

in Taiwan and Hong Kong were also studied in

(Grano, 2014). Similarly to Japan, they are seismic

countries, densely populated and with nuclear power

plants located side by side to urban centres, or in close

proximity to numerous underwater volcanoes. The

paper presents the implication of the government and

media in disseminating crucial information and

influencing public opinion and perception of risk.

Education on natural disasters in general also has its

impact in this respect (Smawfield and Ed, 2013).

The idea supported in this paper is that education

and awareness can also be created in correlation with

formalized knowledge regarding the management of

154

Ionita, A., Olteanu, A. and Pietraru, R.

Knowledge-based Education and Awareness about the Radiological and Nuclear Hazards.

DOI: 10.5220/0008165301540163

In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2019), pages 154-163

ISBN: 978-989-758-382-7

hazards, crisis situations, and disasters, currently

existing in a multitude of representations, or newly

created for education and awareness purposes.

Section 2 summarizes the existing background and

related work, Section 3 presents the knowledge

representations, composed of: an ontology, a set of

rules, and processes regarding the management of

radiological and nuclear hazards. Section 4 shows the

application of the formalized knowledge in the

development of a platform for education and

awareness concerns.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORK

For the knowledge of our domain of interest, a major

contribution comes from the International Atomic

Energy Agency (IAEA), who also published a

“Nuclear Accident Knowledge Taxonomy” (IAEA,

2016), along with many other reports,

recommendations and guides. Other research-

oriented approaches also exist, like the nuclear or

radiological emergency ontology presented in

(Konstantopoulos and Ikonomopoulos, 2015).

Due to the increasing role of social media in any

crisis situation, including those related to natural

hazards, one also proposed an ontology to help

dealing with the exceeding media content and

extracting situational information (Moi et al, 2016).

A comprehensive review of the state of the art in crisis

management ontologies is given in (Liu et al., 2013),

identifying a set of critical subject areas that cover the

information concepts involved in crisis management,

such as resources, processes, people, organizations,

damage, disasters, infrastructure and geography.

The knowledge bases used in disaster situations

were studied in (Hristidis et al., 2010), based on an

analysis that goes across several Information

Technology areas: data integration and ingestion,

information extraction, information retrieval,

information filtering, data mining and decision

support. Based on the integration of seven existing

vocabularies or ontologies, Gaur et al. (2019)

proposed an ontology relevant for hazard situational

awareness and emergency management, interlinked

with other nine external vocabularies.

A milestone in the European Union was the

development of RODOS (Real-time Online DecisiOn

Support) system for nuclear emergency management

(Bartzis et al., 2000). Its main objectives are to

provide integrated methodological bases, develop

models and databases, and install common hardware

and software frameworks for forecasting the

consequences of an accident and supporting

decisions. The role of multi-criterion analysis to

ensure transparency of the decision-making process

in the management of emergency situations was

described in (Geldermann et al., 2009).

There have also been efforts towards an integrated

approach of hazards, including Chemical, Biological,

Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN), with integrated

monitoring, warning and alerting solutions. Sentinel

Asia is such an example, functioning since 2005,

sharing data from earth observations and in-situ

measurements, and creating a link between the space

and the disaster reduction communities, at

international level (Kaku and Held, 2013). The

European Commission also supported multiple

projects for an integrated management of crisis

situations and for correlated responses in case of

disasters (2017). Such efforts are also related to

another concern at the international level - the

creation of situation awareness tools, to provide a

clear perception of a disaster scenario, and to improve

decision support and the relations between the

involved actors and the environmental factors

(Pavković et al., 2014).

Knowledge engineering was also used in

developing software related to the nuclear energy.

Applications where ontologies were used to

significantly increase the number and the variety of

scenarios for detecting special nuclear materials,

based on a set of initial descriptions, were presented

in (Ward et al., 2011) and (Sorokine et al., 2015). A

web portal for sharing knowledge about nuclear

reactors was described in (Madurai Meenachi and Sai

Baba, 2014); the ontology, represented with Protégé

in OWL, includes concepts about neutron energy,

steam generator detection and protection, control rod

drive mechanisms etc. Furthermore, the design of

nuclear power plants is governed by rules that may be

expressed in ontological models, using for instance

the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) as a

standard language (Fortineau et al., 2012).

3 KNOWLEDGE ON

RADIOLOGICAL AND

NUCLEAR HAZARDS

3.1 Methodology

Our work was performed with the purpose to share

knowledge on radiological and nuclear hazards with

stakeholders concerned of these risks but having

Knowledge-based Education and Awareness about the Radiological and Nuclear Hazards

155

medium to zero scientific background on such topics.

In our collaboration with professors teaching nuclear

technology and with researchers from a physics and

nuclear engineering institute, we first played the part

of software engineers for developing an educational

and awareness platform, but soon discovered that we

were also among the potential users of such a

platform. It was challenging for them to select which

were the basic concepts to be explained and what was

important from the point of view of people who may

have a technical background but are not accustomed

with the specificities of this domain. Our task

consisted in organising the relevant knowledge that

was selected by our partners, and of identifying the

connections between concepts that would help for an

easier understanding and then for a better navigability

within the platform. Furthermore, we wanted to go

beyond getting accustomed to a basic terminology

and to introduce some insights into the judgement

criteria of the relevant authorities, because this might

increase the population cooperativeness and trust, and

might also offer the possibility to check the validity

of some decisions one may be directly affected by.

This is particularly important in our country, due to

the operation of a nuclear power plant and the

proximity of other nuclear facilities that may induce

further territorial vulnerabilities (Lazaro et al., 2017).

The work resulted in: a) an ontology to organize

the resources for informal education and awareness

about the radiological and nuclear hazards; b) the

design of a rule-based simulator dedicated to non-

specialists, based on criteria, activities and threshold

levels conforming to the reccomendations of IAEA

(International Atomic Energy Agency); c) the formal

representation of processes to be followed for

prevention, protection and emergency response

situations.

The knowledge representation was realized in

multiple languages, including: UML (Unified

Modeling Language), OWL (Web Ontology

Language), XML (Extensible Markup Language) and

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation). They

were then applied for realizing a TikiWiki platform,

including semantic links, and a tool to simulate the

authorities’ decisions in a variety of situations related

to radiological and nuclear vulnerabilities. The

platform was also used by students in Power

Engineering who chose the Nuclear Power Plant

program (Ionita et al., 2016).

3.2 The Nuclear-Watch Ontology

Based on the selection made by specialists in nuclear

engineering and physics, we represented a set of

concepts that are relevant for understanding the

nuclear and radiological vulnerabilities and for

creating awareness. The work was part of a project

developing prediction tools for the influence of

radioactive clouds on the territory situated in the near

and far field of a nuclear facility (N-WATCHDOG,

2017). Thus, our aim was to offer support for

education and awareness, necessary for understating

and testing the project results, and not to elaborate an

exhaustive ontology, because, this would have to

cover multiple domains that are already characterized

by a very detailed terminology. We worked on the

basis of a glossary with four categories of concepts:

 Hazard Management

 Emergency management

 Organizational structure and

 Nuclear and radiological reference terms.

This knowledge was structured in the Nuclear-

Watch ontology, covering the scope of education and

awareness (see Figure 1). We added two kinds of

relationships: on the one hand, there are the

relationships between the Nuclear-Watch concepts,

on the other hand, there are correspondences to

concepts from other ontologies representing

knowledge from related domains, for validation

purposes. One of them is VuWiki (Vulnerability

Ontology 1.0) (Khazai et al., 2014) - a selection of

concepts to which we identified correspondences is

light-coloured represented in Figure 1, as opposed to

our coloured concepts. The Nuclear-Watch ontology

was also represented in OWL, using Protégé.

The concepts selected in the representation from

Figure 1 and pertaining to the first three categories –

Emergency management, Hazard management and

Organizational structure – are explained below.

For the Hazard category we selected the following

concepts relevant for awareness:

 Hazard management system – represents an

assembly of physical, software and human

components for monitoring, processing and

visualization of specific hazards;

 Alert system – supports the decision and

communication of alerts in case of disastrous

events having happened;

 Early warning system – covers strategic,

technical and operational aspects, with the

purpose of avoiding or reducing the disastrous

effects; its conception and realization

considerably depends on the type of hazard,

with a clear differentiation between rapid-onset

threats, like nuclear plant failures, and slow-

onset threats, like climate change (UNEP,

2012);

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156

Data processing

Hazard monitoring

Data visualization

Emergency situation

Population

protection

Emergency situation

response

Decision system Communication

Emergency situation

intervention

Risk management Alert messages

Legal framework

Institutional

framework

Early warning

system

Alert system

Realize

Is part of

incl udes

has monitoring

Emergency

management

Refers to

Is based on

Is used for

Hazard management

system

Has processing

realize

Conforms to

Is o perat ed by

Is kind of

Has visualization

Is realized for

Is realized through

Vulnerability assessment/

Methodological approach/

Operational approach/ Data

analysis

Corresponds to

Vulnerability assessment/

Methodological approach/

Operational approach/ Data

collection

Vulnerability assessment/

Methodological approach/ Operational

approach/ Data Analysis// Mapping

(spatial or tem poral)

Corresponds to

Vulnerability assessment/

Methodological approach/

Theoretical approach/

Definition of vulnerability

Has definition

Vulnerability assessment/

Reference framework of

assess ment / Target users/

Civil protection

Corresponds to

Vulnerability assessment/

Methodological approach/

Theoretical approach/ Related

theoretical concepts / Risk

Corresponds to

Is based on

Corresponds to

Is used for

Emergency Hazard

Organization

Figure 1: Selection of concepts from the Nuclear-Watch ontology.

 Hazard monitoring – is specific to the type of

hazard and may be realized with diverse

measuring instruments, like sensors, satellites,

spectrometers, thermometers etc.);

 Data processing – is performed for a variety of

goals: estimation of derived physical

quantities, prediction, risk assessment, risk

mitigation, organizing and storing data for

historical purposes, transforming data for

communication purposes (Ionita and Olteanu,

2014);

 Data visualization – uses data acquired at

hazard monitoring and includes maps, graphs,

tables, color-coded advisories, video images.

For the Emergency category, the concepts

considered are:

 Emergency management – represents the

overall organization of resources for dealing

with emergency situations, possibly realized by

existing hazard management systems; a

collection of twenty-six definitions of

emergency management, along with a

comprehensive presentation of the related

terminology, are given in (Wayne Blanchard,

2008) and (Khorram-Manesh, 2017);

 Population protection – is performed when a

hazard-related event happened, but the effects

do not require emergency reactions; in the case

of nuclear vulnerabilities, the protection may

consist in sheltering, iodine administration, or

temporary relocation;

 Emergency situation – is characterized of a

significant augmentation of the risks to which

the population and the personnel working in the

affected facility are exposed to;

 Emergency situation response – stands in the

identification and classification of an

emergency, followed by alert and activation of

the authorities responsible with emergency

management;

 Emergency situation intervention – includes

concrete actions performed by emergency

professionals and other organizations, like

national, regional and local authorities;

 Decision system – offers a computerized

support for decision making, based on risk

management, models and collections of data;

 Risk management – is realized by

identification, evaluation and mitigation of

risks concerning the hazard of interest;

 Communication – is used for emergency

situation response, to transmit alert messages to

authorities and other stakeholders, like

economic players in the affected territory,

subscribers or the large public;

 Alert messages – realize the communication in

a form that is approved and well-formatted.

Knowledge-based Education and Awareness about the Radiological and Nuclear Hazards

157

For the organization category, the concepts

introduced in the ontology are:

 Legal framework - consists of the main laws

and government orders to which the emergency

management and a hazard management system

must conform to;

 Institutional framework – is an assembly of

resources and organizations created for

managing emergencies at regional, national or

international levels.

The fourth category, nuclear and radiological

reference terms, includes concepts related to

radiations, environment radioactivity and nuclear

security, accessible to people having a technical

background (high school level); a presentation of

more advanced terms about nuclear emergencies is

given in (Vamanu and Acasandrei, 2014).

3.3 Rules for Prevention, Protection

and Emergency Response

This section describes the knowledge of a rule-based

system (Nowak-Brzezińska and Wakulicz-Deja,

2019) to simulate the decisions to be taken by

responsible authorities and to create awareness on the

nuclear vulnerabilities. We extracted what can be

expressed as a set of rules from the criteria defined

for preparedness and response for a nuclear or

radiological emergency. They were identified based

on reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency

(IAEA, 2005) (

IAEA, 2011).

Figure 2 represents concepts identified in the

nuclear and radiological emergency domain that can

be used for defining rules, represented as a UML

(Unified Modeling Language) class diagram. The

rules belong to six categories that depend on the dose

of radiation, which decreases from A (when “urgent

actions are always justified”) to F (when there are no

“generically justified actions”).

The rules depend on three types of risks, with the

meaning explained below:

 R1 – concerning avertable doses that do not

affect population’s health, hence it is necessary

to take prevention measures;

 R2 – when the population protection is

required due to larger values of projected

doses;

 R3 – when the dose has already been received

and internal / external exposures are high, so

emergency response actions are necessary.

ThresholdCondition

thresholdCode:String

thresholdDose:Real

measuringUnit:UnitOfMeasurement

measuredQuantity:PhysicalQuantity

operation:LogicalOperation

exposureType:ExposureType

exposureTime:ExposureTime

deltaDays:Integer

note:String

constraint:String

TimeFrame

timeFrameCode:String

timeFrameName:String

multiplicity:Multplicity

0..1

Action

actionCode:String

actionName:String

target:ApplicationTarget

constraint:ActionConstraint

purpose:String

1..*

Rule

ruleCode:String

ruleBehavior(ThresholdCondition,

TimeFra me):Acti on[]

category:{A,B,C,D,E,F}

ris k:RiskType

<<Enumeration>>

UnitOfMeasurement

mSv

Gy-Eq

<<Enumeration>>

PhysicalQuantity

E_T

H_AnyOtherOrgan

H_Foetus

H_Skin

H_Thyroid

AD_Torso

AD_Tissue

AD_Foetus

AD_Skin

AD(∆)_RedMarrow

<<Enumeration>>

RiskType

<<Enumeration>>

ActionConstraint

Urgent

Temporary

LimitedArea

LimitedObjects

Discretionary

<<Enumeration>>

ExposureType

Internal

External

Immediately

Figure 2: Object-oriented representation of the concepts used in the rule-based system.

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Table 1: Part of the knowledge base for the rule-based system.

Rule

Code

“If-then” clauses

Premises Conclusion: Recommended Actions

Threshold

Conditions Time

frame

Risk

type

Rule_1

IF (Timeframe_1 AND

Threshold_1) THEN (Action_14)

≈ 5 mSv

1 year

Action_14. Replacement of food, milk

and water

Rule_2

IF (Timeframe_1 AND

Threshold_2) THEN (Action_6

AND Action_16 AND Action_11)

>= 10 mSv

1 year

Action_6. Limited area/object

decontamination

Action_16. Limited restriction of food,

milk and water consumption

Action_11. Public information

Rule_3

IF (Timeframe_8 AND

Threshold_2) THEN (Action_19)

>= 10mSv

2days

R1 Action_19. Sheltering

Rule_4

IF (Timeframe_3 AND

Threshold_3) THEN (Action_13

AND Action_7)

>= 30mSv

1month

Action_13. Temporary relocation

Action_7. Discretionary

decontamination

Rule_5

IF (Timeframe_5 AND

Threshold_4) THEN (Action_8

AND Action_5 AND Action_15)

>= 50mSv

1 week

Action_8. Evacuation

Action_5. Urgent decontamination

Action_15. Restriction of food, milk and

water consumption

Rule_6

IF (Timeframe_3 AND

(Threshold_5 OR

Threashold_11)) THEN

(Action_18 AND Action_1)

>= 0.1Sv

Thyroid

>= 50mSv

1 month

Action_18. Screening based on

individual dose, to determine need for

registration for long term medical

follow-up

Action_1. Advice and basic counseling

Rule_7

IF (Timeframe_10 AND

Threshold_6) THEN (Action_10)

>= 1 Sv

lifetime

R1 Action_10. Permanent resettlement

Rule_8

IF (Timeframe_1 AND

Threshold_7) THEN (Action_6

AND Action_16 AND Action_11)

AnyOtherOrgan

>= 0.1

1 year

Action_6. Limited area/object

decontamination

Action_16. Limited restriction of food,

milk and water consumption

Action_11. Public information

Rule_9

IF (Timeframe_4 AND

Threshold_9) THEN (Action_2)

Foetus

>= 0.1 Sv

Time frame =

months

Action 2. Basic counselling to allow

informed decisions to be made in

individual circumstances

Rule_10

IF (Timeframe_4 AND

Threshold_9) THEN (Action_6

AND Action_16 AND Action_11)

Foetus

>= 0.1 Sv

Time frame =

months

Action 6. Limited area/object

decontamination

Action 16. Limited restriction of food,

milk and water consumption

Action 11. Public information

Rule 11

IF (Timeframe_9 AND

Threshold_10) THEN (Action_3

AND Action_5)

Skin

>= 0.1Sv

Time frame = days

Action3. Contamination control

Action 5. Urgent decontamination

A rule behaviour depends on a threshold value for

the radiation dose, in respect with the generic

reference levels adopted by IAEA, and the time frame

elapsed from the moment of the nuclear incident.

Thus, the premises of the rules are: a) the threshold

conditions regarding the radiation doses compared to

the specified reference levels, b) the time frames, and

c) the risk types.

Knowledge-based Education and Awareness about the Radiological and Nuclear Hazards

159

The conclusion resulted from applying these rules

is a set of actions recommended by IAEA, which are

supposed to be applied by the organizational

structures responsible with emergency management.

The rules are further defined as “if-then” clauses

and their codes have the form Rule_i, where i is the

index, as seen in the examples from Table 1. From the

analysis of IAEA specifications, we identified 25

rules that were included into the knowledge base.

There are 22 threshold conditions identified from

the studied IAEA specifications and we assigned each

of them a code having the form Threshold_i, where i

is the index. A threshold condition represents one of

the rule premises and is assigned with a logical

operation for checking the condition, and a threshold

dose, which is a reference value for a given physical

quantity. The physical quantities that are relevant for

the purpose of the nuclear and radiological

verifications are:

 E (Effective dose) – measured for the entire

organism or for T (the tissue or organ of interest),

 H (Equivalent dose) – to express the stochastic

health effects on the foetus, thyroid or any

other organ, and

 AD (Absorbed dose) – due to the external

exposure of torso, skin, tissue and foetus, or

due to the internal exposure of red marrow,

thyroid, lung, colon and foetus.

An action has a name that indicates what are the

measures to be taken by the emergency personnel,

domain specialists and various responsible

authorities, to avoid or reduce the effects of a

presumable disaster. See several examples in the last

column from Table 1. From the IAEA reports we

extracted 25 possible actions, assigned with a code

Action_i; the conclusion / decision of a rule may

reunite several such actions. A constraint for the time

or space to apply each action may exist, to specify that

it has to be performed urgently or immediately, to

certain objects, or to an entire area.

Based on this knowledge base, we defined the

decision tree from Figure 3, where the decisions were

organized in respect with the types of risks (R1, R2

and R3) correspondent to prevention, protection and

emergency response to nuclear and radiological

situations.

3.4 Processes

The IAEA reports studied for obtaining the

knowledge base of rules include the representation of

several processes, like the situation assessment in the

contamination of large or moderate areas (IAEA,

2011). However, for awareness purposes, we needed

to show the big picture and not only details for

specific procedures to be followed by specialists. For

this purpose, we distributed the threshold conditions,

rules and activities into three groups, in respect with

the type of risk they are recommended for, and we

represented three processes, for prevention (risk type

R1), population protection (risk type R2) and

emergency response (risk type R3).

Figure 4 illustrates the prevention process

represented in BPMN. The tasks, notated as

rectangles with rounded corners, correspond to the

measurements of physical quantities necessary in

decision making and to the actions recommended by

IAEA (previously explained in Section 3.2).

The decisions, represented as diamonds in

BPMN, verify whether the threshold conditions are

met, by comparing the measured values with the

reference levels from the IAEA safety guides. In

respect with the threshold conditions fulfilled or not,

the sequence flow advances to the actions

recommended in that situation.

The timer intermediate events, represented with

the clock icon, correspond to the time frames

mentioned in Section 3.3. For example, two days after

the incident, if the effective dose measured in tissues

is greater or equal to 10 Sv, it is recommended to

shelter, in order to reduce the exposure to radiation.

4 APPLICATION

The knowledge described in Section 3 was applied for

the development of an educational and awareness

platform with Tiki Wiki, creating wiki pages

correspondent to the Nuclear-Watch ontology

concepts and capitalizing the Semantic Links

functionality to define relations between them. Thus,

we introduced new link types that are mutually

inverted, to improve the navigability and the search

capabilities.

The platform also contains a simulator of the rule-

based system where it is possible to introduce the date

of the presumable nuclear incident, a set of values for

the relevant physical quantities presented in Section

3.2 and the date when the measurements were taken.

Based on these inputs, an inference engine is run, and

the recommended actions are displayed to the user.

For the purpose of this simulator, the representation

of knowledge was done in Extensible Markup

Language (XML), based on an appropriate schema

for creating a unitary structure and a specific content.

The knowledge base has specific files for each

concept necessary for executing the rule beha-

viour, with child elements that correspond to the class

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Nuclear or

Radiological

Event

Threashold_2

OR Threashold_7

OR Threashold_9

OR Threashold_12

Action_5

Action_7

Action_8

Action_3

Action_2

Action_1

Action_9

Action_10

Action_11

Action_12

Action_13

Action_14

Action_15

Action_16

Action_17

Action_18

Action_19

Action_20

Action_21

Action_22

Action_23

Action_24

Action_25

Action_6

Threashold_5

OR Threashold_11

Threashold_17

OR Threashold_18

OR Threashold_19

OR Threashold_20

OR Threashold_21

OR Threashold_22

END

Threashold_12

Threashold_2

OR Threashold_7

OR Threashold_9

OR Threashold_12

Threashold_1

Threashold_2

Threashold_3

Threashold_4

Threashold_6

Threashold_10

Threashold_12

Threashold_11

Threashold_9

Figure 3: Decision tree for prevention, protection and

emergency response.

attributes from Figure 2, e.g.:

 the representation of actions, having five child

elements: actionCode, actionName, target,

constraint and purpose;

 the representation of timeframes, with three

child elements: timeFrameCode,

timeFrameName and multiplicity;

 the representation of threshold conditions, with

ten child elements: thresholdCode,

thresholdDose, measuringUnit,

measuredQuantity, operation, exposureType,

exposureTime, deltaDays, note and constraint.

Measure

Tyroid

Iodine

prophylaxis

Decontami-

nation

>=50 mSv

2 days

Several

days

1 week

1 month

1 year

Measure E

Permanent

relocation

>= 1Sv

Measure E

Sheltering

>= 10 mSv

Measure

Skin

Contamination

control

Urgent

decontamination

>= 0.1 Sv

Discretionary

decontamination

>= 10 mSv

Measure E

Evacuation

Food, milk, water

restrictions

>=50 mSv

Measure E

Temporary

relocation

Discretionary

decontamination

>=30 mSv

Measure E

Replace

food, milk,

water

>=5 mSv

Urgent

decontamination

Figure 4: Prevention process.

Although its main purpose was to create

awareness in general, the platform was also used in

educational settings, for junior students in power

engineering, who can visualize fundamental notions

about the physical phenomena related to nuclear

facilities, understand the alert and early warning

systems, study legal aspects and learn more about the

Knowledge-based Education and Awareness about the Radiological and Nuclear Hazards

161

organizational framework responsible of emergency

situations. Moreover, the teachers were allowed to

define new wiki pages, edit the existing content, and

introduce new navigation links based on semantics.

More details on the educational aspects and the tests

performed were given in (Ionita et al., 2016).

5 CONCLUSIONS

The paper presented several representations of

knowledge for education and awareness about

nuclear and radiological vulnerabilities, applied for

the development of a platform with semantic

functionality. First, we introduced the Nuclear-Watch

ontology, based on a selection of concepts made by

specialists with academic and research profiles,

which was represented in OWL and linked with other

existing ontologies with a larger scope, i.e.

vulnerability assessment and disaster management.

The ontology was then used for organizing the Tiki

Wiki platform and for introducing semantic links.

Then, we defined a set of rules for assessing a

situation related to a nuclear or radiological risk and

offering information about the recommended actions

to be taken by authorities responsible with emergency

management. The premises are the measurements

taken for radiation doses, the timeframe from the

presumable accident, and the type of risk. All the

rules conform to the specifications of the

International Atomic Energy Agency and are applied

within a simulator accessible from the platform, with

educational scope.

Finally, for awareness purposes, we grouped the

rules into three categories in respect with the type of

risk, and we represented business processes

correspondent to prevention, protection and

emergency response.

Future work should also include cooperation with

experts from social sciences and humanities, to

investigate how such a platform would be perceived

by the large public, and what are the elements to be

adapted. This might concern the ontology concepts

for awareness purposes, the level of detail of their

descriptions in the wiki pages, the semantic links, and

the look-and-feel of the rule-based simulator.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was partially supported by the FSS project

no. 114/GP/10.04.2019.

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