empathi: An ontology for Emergency Managing and Planning about Hazard Crisis

In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors and social media content generated by local people. A bold obstacle to capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts concerning with the domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises. Although empathi has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary concepts and relations being essential in this domain. This ontology is available at https://w3id.org/empathi/

Remote sensing utility in a disaster struck urban environment

Six major public health areas which might be affected by a natural disaster were identified. The functions and tasks associated with each area following a disaster, potential ways remote sensing could aid these functions, and the baseline data which would expedite problem solving associated with these functions are discussed

The examination of gathering points' capacity regarding mobility and accessibility: Case of Bayrakli district

The concept of accessibility that bases on continuing the flow of people, goods and services uninterruptedly is discussed as "maximum contact by minimum facility". This concept which is related with the distance has been evaluated various criteria such as physical, economic, perceptual, temporal, etc. Several assignations (optimum location, minimum distance, best distribution method, etc.) have revealed the importance of gathering points in terms of proceeding the disaster management properly. The origin point of linking "accessibility" and "transportation network" is the mobility which reveals as accessing people to adequate gathering points and services in the shortest time. These gathering points which are determined due to the specific criteria and also referred to the social infrastructure areas have a vital importance when any disaster or emergencies occur; so the site selection, availability and accessibility of these areas become extremely significant. The aim of this study is to examine the accessibility of gathering points in Bayrakli district located in Izmir city by taking minimum standards and also some recommendations into consideration. The spatial analyses based on current and potential gathering points are carried out via ArcMap software. The current and potential gathering points in Bayrakli district are examined in terms of accessibility their capacity for each neighbourhood due to their spatial distribution. According to the results, each gathering points in neighbourhoods cannot be accessible in the shortest duration by walking and also the current urban pattern affects the capacity parameter regarding the accessibility and mobility significantly. © Authors 2018. CC BY 4.0 License

Flooding through the lens of mobile phone activity

Natural disasters affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide every year. Emergency response efforts depend upon the availability of timely information, such as information concerning the movements of affected populations. The analysis of aggregated and anonymized Call Detail Records (CDR) captured from the mobile phone infrastructure provides new possibilities to characterize human behavior during critical events. In this work, we investigate the viability of using CDR data combined with other sources of information to characterize the floods that occurred in Tabasco, Mexico in 2009. An impact map has been reconstructed using Landsat-7 images to identify the floods. Within this frame, the underlying communication activity signals in the CDR data have been analyzed and compared against rainfall levels extracted from data of the NASA-TRMM project. The variations in the number of active phones connected to each cell tower reveal abnormal activity patterns in the most affected locations during and after the floods that could be used as signatures of the floods - both in terms of infrastructure impact assessment and population information awareness. The representativeness of the analysis has been assessed using census data and civil protection records. While a more extensive validation is required, these early results suggest high potential in using cell tower activity information to improve early warning and emergency management mechanisms.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Global Humanitarian Technologies Conference (GHTC) 201

Mobile satellite services for public safety, disaster mitigation and disaster medicine

Between 1967 and 1987 nearly three million lives were lost and property damage of $25 to$100 billion resulted form natural disasters that adversely affected more than 829 million people. The social and economic impacts have been staggering and are expected to grow more serious as a result of changing demographic factors. The role that the Mobile Satellite Service can play in the International Decade is discussed. MSS was not available for disaster relief operations during the recent Loma Prieta/San Francisco earthquake. However, the results of a review of the performance of seven other communication services with respect to public sector operations during and shortly after the earthquake are described. The services surveyed were: public and private telephone, mobile radio telephone, noncellular mobile radio, broadcast media, CB radio, ham radio, and government and nongovernment satellite systems. The application of MSS to disaster medicine, particularly with respect to the Armenian earthquake is also discussed