Abstract

Important information pertaining to emergencies and responses to the emergencies is often distributed across numerous Internet sites. In the event of a disaster like an earthquake, rapid access to such information is critical. At such moments the general public usually has a hard time navigating through numerous sites to retrieve and integrate information, and this may severely affect our capability to make critical decisions in a timely manner. Common earthquake mashups often lack relevant information like locations of first responders and routing to important facilities (e.g. hospitals and fire stations) which could save important time and lives. To address the challenges, we developed an Earthquake Information Mashup prototype. This prototype demonstrates a mashup approach to providing a Web visualization of real-time earthquake monitoring and complementary information, such as traffic conditions, the location of important facilities and routing to them. It also offers users the ability to communicate local condition. Users are thus able to better integrate information from various near real-time sources, obtain better situational awareness, and make smarter informed critical decisions.

Highlights

  • Natural disasters like earthquakes often strike unexpectedly and leave the public incapable of dealing with the situation

  • It makes use of Browser-side API such as Google Maps API which provides a geographic frame for the basemap, Google Traffic API which is used to obtain live traffic conditions, and Google Directions API which is used to provide routing to essential facilities within a twenty mile buffer

  • A prototype was developed to demonstrate the potential efficiency of the system to produce an automated visualization and routing tool for the general public

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Summary

Introduction

Natural disasters like earthquakes often strike unexpectedly and leave the public incapable of dealing with the situation. A GIS is appropriate for emergency response as it communicates a better view of the event impact, and the distribution of the resources that are available to respond to the post-event conditions It allows end-users to select data necessary to analyze, to identify spatial patterns, to solve resource allocation problems, and to make good spatial decisions [14]. WebGIS provides a platform for distributing geospatial information, Websites such as ArcGIS.com allow users to download data and use its Web services. Browser-side mashups function through processing on the client computer They use relevant Web services and technologies such as JavaScript, AJAX and XML. We investigated how a mashup could be used to integrate spatial information for earthquake emergency response

Rich Internet Application
Mashup
System Design and Architecture
Prototype Implementation
System Demonstration
Conclusions and Discussion
Full Text
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