The Needs and Geospatial Technologies Available for Disaster Management in Urban Environment

The emerging and enabling geospatial technologies are providing the useful ways to deal with disaster situations and to incorporate these technologies in an interoperable environment is valuable. Urban disaster has increased in recent years as we live in vulnerable society. The geospatial technologies, information technologies, GIS and remote sensing all have their role to play in order to diminish the threats caused by the disaster. This paper explores the potential needs and geospatial technologies available for managing the initial disaster response phase efficiently. To setup a geospatial information system environment is a challenging task, especially the integration of different geospatial tools and technologies available to manage disaster situation in an interoperable environment. The system architecture is carefully designed to meet the requirements in disaster situation and to respond. It is believed that the methodology will facilitate better disaster management during an initial response phase. The objectives of this research were to create an interoperable environment using various geospatial technologies and tools available in a client server architecture. Then to develop a prototype web model supported by underlying system architecture designed, which will perform routing dynamically in disaster situations beneficial for management to take appropriate actions.