Forest fires have frequently occurred and caused great harm to people’s lives. Many researchers use machine learning techniques to predict forest fires by considering spatio-temporal data features. However, it is difficult to efficiently obtain the features from large-scale, multi-source, heterogeneous data. There is a lack of a method that can effectively extract features required by machine learning-based forest fire predictions from multi-source spatio-temporal data. This paper proposes a forest fire prediction method that integrates spatio-temporal knowledge graphs and machine learning models. This method can fuse multi-source heterogeneous spatio-temporal forest fire data by constructing a forest fire semantic ontology and a knowledge graph-based spatio-temporal framework. This paper defines the domain expertise of forest fire analysis as the semantic rules of the knowledge graph. This paper proposes a rule-based reasoning method to obtain the corresponding data for the specific machine learning-based forest fire prediction methods, which are dedicated to tackling the problem with real-time prediction scenarios. This paper performs experiments regarding forest fire predictions based on real-world data in the experimental areas Xichang and Yanyuan in Sichuan province. The results show that the proposed method is beneficial for the fusion of multi-source spatio-temporal data and highly improves the prediction performance in real forest fire prediction scenarios.

Forest fires destroy the ecological environment and cause large property loss. There is much research in the field of geographic information that revolves around forest fires. The traditional forest fire prediction methods hardly consider multi-source data fusion. Therefore, the forest fire predictions ignore the complex dependencies and correlations of the spatiotemporal kind that usually bring valuable information for the predictions. Although the knowledge graph methods have been used to model the forest fires data, they mainly rely on artificially defined inference rules to make predictions. There is currently a lack of a representation and reasoning methods for forest fire knowledge graphs. We propose a knowledge-graph- and representation-learning-based forest fire prediction method in this paper for addressing the issues. First, we designed a schema for the forest fire knowledge graph to fuse multi-source data, including time, space, and influencing factors. Then, we propose a method, RotateS2F, to learn vector-based knowledge graph representations of the forest fires. We finally leverage a link prediction algorithm to predict the forest fire burning area. We performed an experiment on the Montesinho Natural Park forest fire dataset, which contains 517 fires. The results show that our method reduces mean absolute deviation by 28.61% and root-mean-square error by 53.62% compared with the previous methods.