A volunteered geographic information (VGI) framework for disaster management based on mobile services and SDI

Abstract

With the advent of communication technology and location enabled handheld devices, the citizens, regardless of their knowledge or expertise, may help in generating spatial information. This phenomenon is known as volunteered geographic information (VGI). Thus, VGI can be seen as a way of producing geographic information and as a tool for updating national geographic databases. This work proposes a volunteered geographic information (VGI) framework for disaster management, primarily focuses on flood disaster. During disaster situation, the local volunteers may provide authentic and real-time information to the disaster management decision-makers and in-situ rescue worker. The local volunteers also can involve in initial rescue operation by using their domain knowledge and physical capacity. The work involves: (i) development of a geospatial platform for collecting authentic data for disaster management from the local volunteers; (ii) integrating with backend SDI for generation of disaster risk map by the processing of volunteered data along with the geospatial data from several authoritative data sources; (iii) development of a rescue plan based on information provided by the local volunteers by using ant colony optimization technique, etc. The system has been validated with some real and simulated data related to flood disaster.