Supporting Decision Making in Maritime Environmental Protection with a Knowledge-based Education and Awareness Approach

In this paper we present an approach which aims to support learners in general and environmental decision makers in particular, towards effective decision making in maritime environmental pollution via education and awareness of specific maritime environmental pollution policies. We build on previous work concerning the automatic construction of multiple-choice questions from ontologies (automatic assessment) and extend it by integrating if-then rules towards building an environmental knowledge base for maritime pollution. Preliminary evaluation of this work is conducted with a prototype environmental pollution (focused on maritime pollution with oil) ontology in OWL and example rules in SWRL for capturing knowledge related to diagnosis, response and environmental-change events of oil spill pollution.