TITLE:
Mashing up Geographic Information for Emergency Response—An Earthquake Prototype
AUTHORS:
Shawn Dias, Chaowei Yang, Anthony Stefanidis, Mathew Rice
KEYWORDS:
CyberGIS, Natural Hazards, Social Media, Performance, CloudGIS
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.6 No.5,
October
21,
2014
ABSTRACT: Importantinformation pertaining to emergencies
and responses totheemergencies 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 mayseverely
affect our capability to makecritical
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 providinga 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 makesmarterinformedcritical decisions.