Semantic enhanced WebGIS approach to visualize Chinese historical natural hazards

Among China’s vast majority of ancient literature, a wide variety of historical material about natural hazards and natural phenomena are recorded. These records provide significant data and documents for research on historical natural hazards. However, Chinese ancient literature is heterogeneous in syntactic, structural and semantic levels, lacking systematical and scientific information collation, which hinder their use in the research on historical natural hazards. This article presents a solution for promoting comprehensive in-depth understanding of historical natural hazard records by developing a semantic enhanced WebGIS platform. It includes: (1) a geodatabase to systematically store and manage Chinese historical information on natural hazards collated from ancient literature; (2) an ontology to mitigate semantic heterogeneity problems among different datasets; (3) WebGIS tools to visualize and analyze natural hazards in a multidisciplinary way. The platform is compliant to other historical and culture data at spatial and temporal levels. A survey on users’ expectation and satisfactions are conducted. Conclusions and discussions are also raised to suggest further improvements for the semantic enhanced WebGIS platform.