Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1 Introduction
In the last two decades, particularly from 2004 to 2011, most countries located on
the Pacific Ring of Fire such as Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand, and
some Central American countries like Haiti have suffered severe damages as the
consequences of tremendous earthquakes. A recent statistic by the United States
Geological Survey (
2012
) showed that over 230,000 people were killed by the
devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami whereas the number of people killed and
injured by the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the Mw 9.0 magnitude Japan earthquake
were a quarter of million and nearly 20,000 people, respectively.
In the 1990s of the twentieth century, researchers and practitioners concerned
with disaster management have engaged in a lengthy attempt to define funda-
mental concepts such as emergency, risk, hazard, disaster, and disaster manage-
ment. According to Johnson (
2000
) an emergency is ''a deviation from planned or
expected behavior or a course of events that endangers or adversely affects people,
property, or the environment''. In another study, Gravley (
2001
) stated that
disasters often result in great damage, loss, or destruction, so a disaster can also be
defined as the onset of an extreme event causing profound damage or loss as
perceived by the inflicted people. Furthermore, in the research titled Disasters and
Development, Cuny (
1983
) concluded that disaster management deals with the set
of complex decision-making issues related to prevention, control, and recovery
from natural and human-made disasters. Disaster management, hence, involves lot
of information collection, management, analysis and visualization, and especially
all are location-based information.
Practical deployment has proved that the contribution of geoinformation
technologies significantly improved the effectiveness in disaster management,
especially during the post-disaster response to assist the disaster relief activities.
Over a decade, under the coordination of International Charter on Space and Major
Disasters and UN-SPIDER, satellite images have been acquired timely providing
the unique information from the sky; especially to some hard-hit and inaccessible
areas they are the only source of information (Stryker and Jones
2009
; Vu and Ban
2010
). Remote sensing imageries, however, cannot reveal truly the situations on
the ground and up to the details of requirement. Advanced technologies today,
fortunately, provided appropriate mechanism for collection and management of
vast amount information contributed from the crowd formed by disaster practi-
tioners, NGO teams, residences, etc. In recent large-scale disasters, we could
observe the contribution of wiki, blogs, social networks, and collaborative map-
ping platforms in emergency responses (Heinzelman and Waters
2010
; Vivacqua
and Borges
2012
; Kerle and Hoffman
2013
;Vu
2013
).
Advanced computer and IT technologies have brought GIS deployment from
desktop to web-based platforms providing map, geospatial data and processing
services and now cloud-based services. Desktop environment limits in local
organisation and has to be handled by trained experts; data sharing and collabo-
rative
analysis,
hence,
are
localised
within
an
organisation.
The
web-based
