CyberEye: Development of integrated cyber-infrastructure to support rapid hurricane risk assessment

Abstract

Recent losses provide sobering evidence of the continued need for more effective tools to support hurricane risk assessment and mitigation that can leverage the latest developments both in the characterization of the hazard and its impacts on built environments. This paper provokes the question of whether open-source virtual environments can indeed provide the appropriate venue to do so, leveraging application programming interfaces and a modular approach to packaging the overall framework that encourages the progressive integration of data, tools and models from the community. This paper presents one opportunity: a virtual environment called CyberEye and the cyberinfrastructure that backs this collaboration space, providing users with a customizable dashboard where they can annotate, mark up and share information with other authorized users through a web-based geospatial environment. The paper focuses on the platform׳s two distinct workflows: Rapid Risk Assessment and Data Intake and Discovery, providing for each working User Scenarios to demonstrate the platform capabilities, relative to the current standard of practice.