A RS data portal for disaster situations via OGC WCS and open source GIS

RS plays an increasingly important role in disaster preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery. With RS data, we can correctly assess the disaster situations and make appropriate decisions. However, due to the explosive growth of RS data in disaster fields, how to effectively discover, utilize and integrate the relevant data to meet the needs of people from different fields in the distributed environment is a key issue to solve. This study is to develop a RS data portal for disaster situations based on OGC WCS and open source GIS. The portal includes four primary parts named as Application Client, Application Server, Catalog Server, and Data Share Center, which bridges the gap between data providers and data users, and simplifies the discovery and use of imagery data. The portal can effectively publish many kinds of imagery or gridded data, and can be deployed in distributed network environment, and follows OGC standard GetCapabilities, DescribeCoverage and GetCoverage interface. In addition, some key technologies including spatial database storage and index, spatial metadata are described in detail. It is proved to be a feasible architecture to integrate and share RS data for disaster management.