A geo-event-based geospatial information service: A case study of typhoon hazard

Abstract

Social media is valuable in propagating information during disasters for its timely and available characteristics nowadays, and assists in making decisions when tagged with locations. Considering the ambiguity and inaccuracy in some social data, additional authoritative data are needed for important verification. However, current works often fail to leverage both social and authoritative data and, on most occasions, the data are used in disaster analysis after the fact. Moreover, current works organize the data from the perspective of the spatial location, but not from the perspective of the disaster, making it difficult to dynamically analyze the disaster. All of the disaster-related data around the affected locations need to be retrieved. To solve these limitations, this study develops a geo-event-based geospatial information service (GEGIS) framework and proceeded as follows: (1) a geo-event-related ontology was constructed to provide a uniform semantic basis for the system; (2) geo-events and attributes were extracted from the web using a natural language process (NLP) and used in the semantic similarity match of the geospatial resources; and (3) a geospatial information service prototype system was designed and implemented for automatically retrieving and organizing geo-event-related geospatial resources. A case study of a typhoon hazard is analyzed here within the GEGIS and shows that the system would be effective when typhoons occur.