Learning the Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies through an Ontology-Based Information System

A critical infrastructure (CI) is an array of assets and systems that, if disrupted, would threaten national security, economy, public health and safety, and way of life. Essential to the practice of critical infrastructure planning and drills are two pieces of knowledge. One concerns the interactions within a CI system (intradomain interdependencies), and the other concerns the interactions among the CI systems (cross-domain interdependencies). A thorough understanding of these two interwoven CI interdependencies is crucial to such tasks as vulnerability assessment, scenario composition, and homeland security drills. In this paper we present a new approach that facilitates the learning of the interdependencies. Employing a loosely coupled system of GIS and an ontology-based object modeling system developed in this study, it represents and visualizes the intradomain and cross-domain CI interdependencies both diagrammatically and geographically. The system and its knowledge representation methodology were tested through a case study in the Southeastern United States.