Introduction
A disaster is defined as a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society causing widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses which exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources (ISDR, 2003). Disasters interrupt the societies by claiming lives, creating victims, and destroying infrastructures and houses. By striking disasters, funds and budgets that have been assigned for development purposes are diverted to responding to disaster and recovering the quality of life to its normal. Disasters have also negative impacts on environment as they affect natural resources. Therefore, considering society, economy and environment as three main components of sustainable development, disasters have negative impacts on them and hence negative impact and delay on sustainable development.
With this in mind, appropriate management on disasters can contribute to reducing its negative impacts on development activities. With other talk by facilitating disaster management, achievement of sustainable development can be facilitated for nations and societies.
The experiences of disaster management activities, particularly responding to the World Trade Center event on September 11, 2001 have proven that spatial data can considerably facilitate disaster management because most of the required information for disaster management has spatial nature (Bruzewicz, 2003 and Donohue, 2002). In this respect, spatial data and related technologies such as Geographical Information System (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS), remote sensing, and photogrammetry including visible, thermal and LIght Detecting And Ranging (LIDAR) imaging have proven to be crucial for disaster management in such a way that without spatial data, one can not expect effective and efficient disaster management (Cutter et. al, 2003 and Amdahl, 2002).
However, current studies show that although spatial data can facilitate disaster management, there are substantial problems with collection, access, dissemination and usage of required spatial data for disaster management (SNDR, 2002). Considering mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery as four phases of disaster management (FEMA, 1998) such problems become more serious during disaster response which starts after occurrence of disaster for managing emergency situation.
Disaster response is dynamic and decision-makers need to be updated on latest emergency situation by regular collection of information on emergency situation. Disaster response is also time-sensitive with little allowance on delay in decision-making and response operations. Therefore, any problem or delay in data collection, access, usage and dissemination has negative impacts on quality of disaster response.
It is suggested that Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) as an initiative in spatial data management can be an appropriate framework and a web-based system can be an appropriate tool for resolving current problems with spatial data. With the other talk, using SDI as a framework and a web-based system as a tool disaster management can be facilitated which contributes to facilitating achievement of sustainable development. With this in mind, this paper aims to describe the development of an SDI conceptual model and a prototype web-based system that facilitate spatial data collection, access, dissemination, management and usage for proper disaster management. This is based on an ongoing research and case study in Iran which investigates the role of SDI in disaster management with emphasize on the response phase.
Resolving the problem with data for Disaster Management
Different organizations (such as Fire, Medical and police departments; Red Cross Society; and Utility Companies) collaborate in disaster management activities due to diversity of disaster response operations. Inter-organizational coordination of disaster response operations and controlling the emergency situation is generally conducted through Emergency Operation Center (EOC) where the representatives of involved organizations are gathered.
Considering search, relief, rescue, firefighting, medical service, debate removal, sheltering, and repairing utility network as some examples of disaster response activities, a large number of spatial data layers are required for planning and coordinating such operations. In this respect Road network, closed road, hospital, disaster area, damaged building, location of victims, location of emergency workers, available resources, and utility network are some examples of required spatial data layers for disaster response operations.
Due to dynamic nature of emergency situation, required data for disaster response should be collected regularly in order to be available for decision-makers. This is achieved through partnership and collaboration between organizations in production and updating spatial datasets. If each of the involved organizations in disaster management community collects some part of required spatial data for disaster response during their everyday business and emergency situation, required spatial data will be available to all participants (Mansourian et al, 2004 and Rajabifard et al 2004).
The required datasets should also be accessible for decision-makers (involved organizations and EOC) to be utilized for planning and decision-making purposes. This is achieved if collected data by each of the participants in data collection to be shared to wider disaster management community.
In addition, the required datasets need to be easily integratable with each other and interoperable with decision-makers’ systems for real-time use. This is achieved by utilization of appropriate standards and specifications for data collection and sharing.
Although a partnership model for spatial data collection and sharing can resolve the problem with collection, access and dissemination of required spatial data for disaster response, however there are still different technical and non-technical (such as institutional, cultural, and political) challenges that impede the participation of organizations in data collection and sharing. Therefore, an appropriate framework needs to be utilized in order to facilitate such partnership.
With this in mind, Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) can be use as an appropriate framework that facilitates the availability, access and usage of spatial data for disaster management.