Flood damage calculations via a RESTful API

Abstract

In Canada and across the globe, flooding has significantly increased in recent decades. Knowledge of the flood hazard alone (extent and frequency) does not provide enough information to the public safety community to make informed decisions regarding potential social and economic losses. While many programs have been developed for flood risk assessment, they require experienced personnel to prepare the data inputs, run and analyse the model outputs. As such, alternative, easy-to-use tools for risk assessment are appealing. We present in this paper a RESTful Application Program Interface (API) for building damage estimation. This API is a web-service which allows access to buildings damage calculations outside of a risk assessment program. It is designed to provide a point of entry for developers to programmatically access the underlying calculation tools to query, calculate and extract damage data directly into a users own software, tools or decision support systems. To validate the accuracy of results the damage data is compared to results from existing software for two communities in Eastern Canada. To illustrate the ease of use of the API, a Python script has been written which reads in a file containing the building information and pre-determined flood depths. This script builds the request for the API and saves the results: damage and exposure.