Hydrogeological monitoring platforms increasingly translate evolving rainfall, soil, slope and river processes into sensor-derived territorial signals, measurements, maps, indicators, thresholds, forecasts and notifications. Yet technical accuracy and availability do not explain how these outputs become meaningful for situated users and support protective orientation. This conceptual article uses an integrative theory-synthesis and model-building approach to connect disaster risk communication, protective action, mental models, sensemaking, distributed cognition and enactive cognition. It introduces situated sense, the contextualization of represented risk in relation to place, time, source, uncertainty, vulnerability and possible action; and operational knowledge, the resulting epistemic orientation through which users and communities can understand what a representation refers to, why it matters, how it may evolve and which responses become relevant. Operational knowledge emphasizes how risk representations become grounded in lived territory, source provenance and practical possibilities, extending beyond the decision relevance of actionable information and the representational focus of situation awareness and common operational pictures. A recursive model links hydrogeological processes, sensor-derived territorial signals, measurements and data, risk information, situated sense, operational knowledge and possible action. The R.I.S.E. project provides a real-world design context to illustrate how sensors, models, platform representations, institutional sources and users form a distributed epistemic infrastructure. The framework yields six design and evaluation dimensions: spatial anchoring, temporal intelligibility, source traceability, uncertainty legibility, action orientation, feedback and participation.