An Open-Source WebGIS Platform for Rapid Disaster Impact Assessment

Natural disaster impacts have increased worldwide in the past decades. Earthquake is 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. WebGIS technologies provide a wide range of solutions to map those damages, analyse data and publish the results. 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 WebGIS prototype using Open-Source Geo-Spatial technologies such as PostGIS, Geoserver, Geoexplorer and OpenStreetMap (OSM) to evaluate the rapid impact of naturally produced disasters for the total damages. For this purpose, expert knowledge, such as earthquake intensities and vulnerability inputs are imported into the system and the loss of the damage is rapidly estimated. This work is part of a project for catastrophe modeling based on OpenSource data and software. We hope that applying Open-Source knowledge and solutions will decrease the time and efforts needed for rapid disaster and catastrophe management.