An integrated geospatial information service system for disaster management in China

Abstract

The Chinese Government and citizens face enormous challenges of disaster management as widespread devastation, economic damages, and loss of human lives caused by increasing natural disasters. Disaster management requires a complicated iterative process that includes disaster monitoring, early detection, forecasting, loss assessment, and efficient analysis of disaster reduction. Each task typically involves the use of technologists and multiple geospatial information resources, including sensors, data sources, models, geo-tools, software packages, and computing resources. However, most existing disaster management systems operate in a typical passive data-centric mode, where resources cannot be fully utilized. This impediment is partially being addressed by the increasingly complex application requirements and the growing availability of diverse resources. In this paper, we summarize and analyze the practical problems experienced by the National Disaster Reduction Application System of China. To address the issues of data-centric, centralized, isolated solutions, we propose a novel Focusing Service Mechanism, which is capable of scheduling and allocating for optimum utilization of multiple resources, to dynamically generate collaborative and on-demand disaster information services. We also demonstrate the design and implementation of the Integrated Disaster Information Service System (IDISS). Through the service strategies of Virtualizing, Wrapping, and Integrating, disaster-related resources are constructed into services in the IDISS. These services are dynamically aggregated into focusing service chains, for diverse disaster management tasks. Actual applications illustrate that the proposed service system can significantly improve the capability of disaster management in China.