Oil Spill Impacts : Taxonomic and Ontological Approaches

Oil spill research is interdisciplinary and includes coastal and marine environmental sciences, biological sciences, chemistry, disaster management, geology, sociology, and government policy. The main purpose of studying oil spill incidents is to assess their impacts and understand how to prevent, investigate, and mitigate their damages. This book presents a taxonomy and a topic map of oil spill concepts, focusing on the environmental, social and economic impacts of oil spills, using the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill as the primary case study.

Starting with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill incident, Oil Spill Impacts: Taxonomic and Ontological Approaches chronicles a timeline of events that focus on the impact of oil spills and provides an understanding of these incidents using a number of approaches. The book includes an interdisciplinary oil spill taxonomy, an oil spill topic map, and highlights information–organization tools, such as indexes, taxonomies, and topic maps that can be used to connect information resources with concepts of interest.

The topic map combines the function of ontology with the function of organized information resources, and contains thousands of concepts and their relationships extracted from approximately 300 documents stemming from various academic conference presentations, journal articles, news reports, and web pages.

Divided into four parts, the book begins with a brief introduction of the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill events followed by a breakdown of the taxonomy concepts distributed into categories and their subcategories. The book then describes the oil spill topic map separated by concepts, relationships, and references.

This interdisciplinary reference provides to its readers:

• The perspective of multiple disciplines instead of just one discipline
• An indication of the most important topics in the oil spill domain
• Developed research in the oil spill and oil drilling areas
• A broad and detailed view of oil spill issues

The book serves students, teachers, and researchers interested in oil spill issues, oil spill incidents, and addresses their impacts that involve coastal and marine environmental sciences, biological sciences, chemistry, disaster management, geology, sociology, and government policy.