Analysis of the 2011 Japan's triple disaster from a conceptual ontology of the domain of risk and disaster,

International audienceIn this paper, we propose to use the factual part of a conceptual ontology realized in 2009 (Provitolo and al. 2009 a) to analyze the disaster that occurred in Japan on 11 March 2011 and which was characterized by a sequence of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. Many papers, reports, videos and press articles were published, each one providing a wide variety of information. Some fo- cused on the massive earthquake that triggered the devastating tsunami waves along the eastern coast of the Tohoku region while others mainly analyzed the nuclear crisis. The aim of this work is to syn- thesize in visual form information from various sources and to produce different kind of analyses. These analyses can either be global or centered on one aspect of the cascading events, on a specific scale or a specific element of the observed system. For example, the instantiation of the conceptual on- tology permits to point out the difficulty facing the nuclear crisis due to the destruction of the road network. It also shows that if the Japan's 2011 triple disaster occurred mainly in Japan, the effects have also a global dimension