An object-relational prototype of GIS-based disaster database

Global natural disasters have caused billions of dollars of property and infrastructure damages, unexpected disruption to socioeconomic activities and tragic loss of human lives each year. It is of paramount importance to collect, maintain and manage detailed and accurate records of disastrous events for an effective risk assessment and mitigation of disaster impacts. Considerable efforts have been directed towards the establishment of databases on historic disasters but many disaster databases built are primarily a set of separate lists of historical disaster events. This paper presents a recent study that investigates effective and efficient GIS-based approaches to the representation, organisation and access of disaster information. This includes logical data models for representing disastrous events, the object-relational approach to database implementation, and internet-based user-interfaces that supports multi-mode (including map-based) database queries and flexible facilities for report generation. Key aspects of a disaster event, including the spatial-temporal dimensions of the hazard and its impacts, are considered in the development of data models and database implementation in order to support user-friendly querying and reporting operations.