WEB SERVICES IN RISK MANAGEMENT

Z. Stachon, J. Kozel, V. Kaplan, T. Reznik

Masaryk university, Institute of Geography, Laboratory on Geoinformatics and Cartography, Brno, Czech republic

zstachon@gmail.com, jirikozel@centrum.cz

There is continuous development of human society. However rapid technological development return benefits and negatives on the other side. Negatives are appearing in rising number of interactions with natural phenomenon. Interactions frequently lead to the emergency situation (floods, fire…) which have to be solved by emergency squads (fire brigade, ambulance…).

Emergency squads need relevant information about the crisis situation to improve their decision process. The information is necessary to be delivered as soon as possible and it must be understandable. On-line access which can be provided by using web map services and special map symbology by contextual cartography.

There are three most known Web services defined by Open Geospatial Consortium:

l Web Map Service (WMS) providing instant maps created from defined layers.

l Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) providing access to vector and raster datasets.

Main features of web services are

1. Web services are built on top of industry standards (XML), which provide expandability, interoperability and independence on the platform. XML related tools (DOM, XLST ...) provide easy possibilities to develop own solution or extend existing ones.

2. Web services allow distributed data storage and processing. E.g. It is possible to store and update spatial data on one computer system and analyze it on another one.

3. Web services make it easy to combine multiple data sources. It's possible to make analyzes on many data sets, each stored on different computer systems.

4. As WMS/WFS/WCS standards are free, they can be used in any application/system. Many commercial GIS products are able to interoperate using web services.

5. Using remote web map services it's easy to deploy “one data store – many users” schema. Datasets can be stored in one data store system; thus, all users in one organization can use it. Using one centralized data store gains profit of easy system management. Centralized data stores makes also new data deployment and data administration easy.

This concept of providing online information by web services for emergency squads was tested on example of dangerous material transportation. Presented poster shows how web services can be helpful in emergency decision making process while using contextual cartography.

This research has been supported by funding from Project of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports No. MSM0021622418 called Dynamic Geovisualization in Risk Management.