Working as one: a road map to disaster resilience for Australia

This report offers a roadmap for enhancing Australia’s disaster resilience, building on the 2011 National Strategy for Disaster Resilience. It includes a snapshot of relevant issues and current resilience efforts in Australia, outlining key challenges and opportunities. Overview Natural disasters cause widespread disruption, costing the Australian economy $6.3 billion per year, and those costs are projected to rise incrementally to$23 billion by 2050. With more frequent natural disasters with greater consequences, Australian communities need the ability to prepare and plan for them, absorb and recover from them, and adapt more successfully to their effects. Enhancing Australian resilience will allow us to better anticipate disasters and assist in planning to reduce losses, rather than just waiting for the next king hit and paying for it afterwards. This report offers a roadmap for enhancing Australia’s disaster resilience, building on the 2011 National Strategy for Disaster Resilience. It includes a snapshot of relevant issues and current resilience efforts in Australia, outlining key challenges and opportunities. The report sets out 11 recommendations to help guide Australia towards increasing national resilience, from individuals and local communities through to state and federal agencies

Crowd sourcing challenges assessment index for disaster management

Emergency agencies (EA) rely on inter-agency approaches to information management during disasters. EA have shown a significant interest in the use of cloud-based social media such as Twitter and Facebook for crowd-sourcing and distribution of disaster information. While the intentions are clear, the question of what are its major challenges are not. EA have a need to recognise the challenges in the use of social media under their local circumstances. This paper analysed the recent literature, 2010 Haiti earthquake and 2010-11 Queensland flood cases and developed a crowd sourcing challenges assessment index construct specific to EA areas of interest. We argue that, this assessment index, as a part of our large conceptual framework of context aware cloud adaptation (CACA), can be useful for the facilitation of citizens, NGOs and government agencies in a strategy for use of social media for crowd sourcing, in preventing, preparing for, responding to and recovering from disasters. © (2012) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office All rights reserved

A Multi-faceted Approach to Collaborative Health Information Systems

Modern healthcare is confronted with increasing costs and complexity, progressive population ageing and pandemics triggered by new disease strains and population displacements fuelled by conflicts and climate change. In this context, effective cooperation and interoperability of the participants and their information systems in the healthcare effort becomes paramount. This brings about significant challenges, as healthcare institutions are typically hierarchical and heterogeneous owing to a complex administrative, geographical and historical context. At the same time, governments find it increasingly difficult to rely on ‘silo’ type information and organisational paradigms in order to manage population wellbeing. Thus, there is an increasing need for innovative, holistic and integrated models that take into account all essential aspects, elements and especially life cycles of all the healthcare effort participants. Building on previous research and applications, this paper proposes that the required modelling artefacts can be built using a life cycle-based holistic paradigm enabled by advances in Information Systems, Interoperability, Collaborative Networks and Enterprise Architecture. This multi-faceted approach holds the promise to a sound platform for sustainable solutions to both long and short-term challenges to population health and well-being

Towards building information modelling for existing structures

The transformation of cities from the industrial age (unsustainable) to the knowledge age (sustainable) is essentially a ‘whole life cycle’ process consisting of; planning, development, operation, reuse and renewal. During this transformation, a multi-disciplinary knowledge base, created from studies and research about the built environment aspects is fundamental: historical, architectural, archeologically, environmental, social, economic, etc is critical. Although there are a growing number of applications of 3D VR modelling applications, some built environment applications such as disaster management, environmental simulations, computer aided architectural design and planning require more sophisticated models beyond 3D graphical visualization such as multifunctional, interoperable, intelligent, and multi-representational. Advanced digital mapping technologies such as 3D laser scanner technologies can be are enablers for effective e-planning, consultation and communication of users’ views during the planning, design, construction and lifecycle process of the built environment. For example, the 3D laser scanner enables digital documentation of buildings, sites and physical objects for reconstruction and restoration. It also facilitates the creation of educational resources within the built environment, as well as the reconstruction of the built environment. These technologies can be used to drive the productivity gains by promoting a free-flow of information between departments, divisions, offices, and sites; and between themselves, their contractors and partners when the data captured via those technologies are processed and modelled into BIM (Building Information Modelling). The use of these technologies is key enablers to the creation of new approaches to the ‘Whole Life Cycle’ process within the built and human environment for the 21st century. The paper describes the research towards Building Information Modelling for existing structures via the point cloud data captured by the 3D laser scanner technology. A case study building is elaborated to demonstrate how to produce 3D CAD models and BIM models of existing structures based on designated technique

Enabling Inter-Repository Access Management between iRODS and Fedora

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-06-04 08:30 AM – 10:00 AMMany digital repositories have been built using different technologies such as Fedora and the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS). This paper analyzes both the Fedora and iRODS technologies to understand how to integrate the two systems to enable cross-repository data sharing. The areas considered include the digital object model, services, management of distributed storage, external data resources, and policy enforcement.National Science Foundatio

MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application

Power Grid Recovery after Natural Hazard Impact

Natural hazards can affect the electricity supply and result in power outages which can trigger accidents, bring economic activity to a halt and hinder emergency response until electricity supply is restored to critical services. This study analyzes the impact of earthquakes, space weather and floods on the power grid recovery time. For this purpose, forensic analysis of the performance of the power grid during 16 earthquakes, 15 space weather events and 20 floods was carried out. The study concluded that different natural hazards affect the power grid in different ways. Earthquakes cause inertial damage to heavy equipment and brittle items, and ground failure and soil liquefaction can be devastating to electric infrastructure assets. Recovery time is driven by the balance of repairs and capabilities. Poor access to damaged facilities, due to landslides or traffic congestion, can also delay repairs. In this study, recovery time ranged from a few hours to months, but more frequently from 1 to 4 days. Floods are commonly associated with power outages. Erosion due to the floodwaters and landslides triggered by floods undermine the foundations of transmission towers. Serious, and often explosive, damage may occur when electrified equipment comes in contact with water, while moisture and dirt intrusion require time-consuming repairs of inundated equipment. Recovery time was driven by the number of needed repairs, and site access, as repairs cannot start until floodwaters have receded. In this study, power was back online from 24 hours up to 3 weeks after the flood. However, longer recovery times (up to 5 weeks) were associated with floods spawned by hurricanes and storms. Space weather affects transmission and generation equipment through geomagnetically induced currents (GICs). In contrast to earthquakes and floods, GICs have the potential to impact the entire transmission network. Delayed effects and the potential for system-wide impact were the main drivers of recovery time in this study. When damage is limited to tripping of protective devices, restoration time is less than 24 hours. However, repairs of damaged equipment may take up to several months. The study concludes with a number of recommendations related to policy, hazard mitigation and emergency management to reduce the risks of natural hazards to electric infrastructure and to improve crisis management in the aftermath of a natural disaster.JRC.E.2-Technology Innovation in Securit