Abstract
Abstract. The geospatial research and development team in the National and Homeland Security Division at Idaho National Laboratory was tasked with providing tools to derive insight from the substantial amount of data currently available – and continuously being produced – associated with the critical infrastructure of the US. This effort is in support of the Department of Homeland Security, whose mission includes the protection of this infrastructure and the enhancement of its resilience to hazards, both natural and human. We present geovisual-analytics-based approaches for analysis of vulnerabilities and resilience of critical infrastructure, designed so that decision makers, analysts, and infrastructure owners and managers can manage risk, prepare for hazards, and direct resources before and after an incident that might result in an interruption in service. Our designs are based on iterative discussions with DHS leadership and analysts, who in turn will use these tools to explore and communicate data in partnership with utility providers, law enforcement, and emergency response and recovery organizations, among others. In most cases these partners desire summaries of large amounts of data, but increasingly, our users seek the additional capability of focusing on, for example, a specific infrastructure sector, a particular geographic region, or time period, or of examining data in a variety of generalization or aggregation levels. These needs align well with tenets of in-formation-visualization design; in this paper, selected applications among those that we have designed are described and positioned within geovisualization, geovisual analytical, and information visualization frameworks.
Highlights
Critical infrastructure protection and visual analyticsThe Presidential Commission Report on Critical Infrastructure Protection (1997) highlighted the complexity, vulnerability, and interconnectedness of our nation’s critical infrastructures (CI)
There are sixteen sectors that are included in the definition of CI of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including energy, food and agriculture, information technology, and transportation systems (PPD 21, 2013); such systems, at the time of the 1997 report, were becoming increasingly vulnerable to physical and cyber-attacks that could result in detrimental service disruptions
Responders and decision makers have many disparate data sources associated with critical infrastructures available to them that include web-based data feeds associated with threats such as weather, earthquake, etc., static geospatial data layers, reports generated from assessments, and vulnerability information
Summary
The Presidential Commission Report on Critical Infrastructure Protection (1997) highlighted the complexity, vulnerability, and interconnectedness of our nation’s critical infrastructures (CI). Motivated by the possibilities of spatial, temporal, and statistical insight generation from the data, as well as the importance of facilitating rapid decision making, DHS supported the construction and customization of information and geographic visualization tools to explore, and “tell stories” with, the CI data under their management These projects include the customization of a standard web GIS toolkit, the development of visual and computational links between spatial and graph-based databases to examine CI relationships and dependencies, the adaptation of opensource graphical and map-ping JavaScript libraries to perform basic data analytics of program- and missionspecific data, and the design of novel interactive mapping projects to view the results of risk and vulnerability assessments that until now have been printed in lengthy paper reports. We will introduce each specific application with a brief description of the framework or program the application is meant to support, an explanation of the problem or scenario the application is designed to address, and a demonstration of the typical design and development workflow we employ to deliver these tools to DHS for implementation in real-world scenarios
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