Prototype of an open-source web-GIS platform for rapid disaster impact assessment

Impacts of natural disasters have increased worldwide in the past decades. Earthquakes are one of the disasters that have been studied for real-time analysis and crisis management. Disaster-related losses have been examined by the damage extent of the houses, infrastructures, fatalities and injuries converted to financial losses. Web-GIS technologies provide a wide range of solutions to map these damages, analyze data and publish the results on the web. Open-source tools and data have been widely used today because they stay free and facilitate access to data especially significant in developing countries. This research presents a web-GIS prototype using open-source geo-spatial technologies such as Postgis, GeoServer, Geoexplorer and OpenStreetMap (OSM) to evaluate the rapid impact of naturally produced disasters like earthquake for the estimation of total damages. For this purpose, expert knowledge such as earthquake intensities and vulnerability inputs are imported into the system. Moreover, OSM data for building information are also extracted for the analysis and the loss of the damage is then rapidly estimated and visualized in the platform. This work is part of a project for catastrophe modeling based on open-source data and software. We hope that applying open-source data, techniques and solutions will decrease the time and efforts needed for rapid disaster and catastrophe management.