Article Preview
TopIntroduction
India has unique geo-climatic conditions, which is vulnerable to several types of disasters such as floods, earthquakes, cyclones, landslides, tsunamis, etc. The super cyclone of 1999, Bhuj earthquake of 2001, Tsunami in 2004, Kosi (Bihar) flood in 2008, Sikkim earthquake in 2011 and Uttarakhand disaster in 2013, Chennai floods in 2015 have shown the urgent need in capacity building for handling disasters in a very efficient and effective manner. This is an urgent need for all our present endeavours to meet and exceed the societal requirements of coordinated scientific and technological output.
First, there is a lack of stakeholder’s awareness and information exchange before, during and after disasters (Perry & Lindel, 1978; Pearce, 2003; Bosher, Dainty, Carrillo, & Glass, 2007). A qualitative research design has been used to the focus group interviews in Tamilnadu, India. Questionnaires were distributed to collect the demographic data and the responses to open-end questions and collected after the discussions. The role of ICT in disaster management is very well conceived in providing access to vital information on disaster management to stakeholders (Abbas, Srivastava, Tiwari & Bala, 2009; Nigel & John, 2012; Taohidul, & Zamri, 2011). Emergency communication for timely relief and response measures is evaluated by actual field data from the affected sites. The various challenges for effective disaster management are:
- •
Gathering timely and location based real time situation data
- •
Information availability and accessibility
- •
Information infrastructure to bridge the information needs between victims and service providers
- •
A platform to integrate dynamic disaster data with static geographic feature data
- •
Interoperable information dissemination services among disaster management stakeholders
- •
A strong spatio-temporal query system through Geo query and OLAP operations
To address the above challenges in an integrated system of multiple artifacts like mobile application, web portal and integration of these artifacts has been designed, implemented and tested. The integrated system is designed aiming at location based real time situation gathering, non-geospatial data and integrated with geospatial data and disseminate this data through OGC web services and also facilitate a strong spatio temporal query system through multiple query engines.
The final system results in effective and efficient disaster-GIS information infrastructure as per OGC standards implemented through the mobile application and web portal.
TopCurrent State Of The Art
This phase discusses various methods and mobile applications that addresses information needs of disaster risk management. The state of the art is organised into two sections: 1) Mobile applications in disaster management, and 2) Integration of disaster data with other spatial data sets and disseminated using web services.