Download Management & Engineering Information System Based on GIS

Management & Engineering 07 (2012) 1838-5745
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Management & Engineering
Journal Homepage: www.seiofbluemountain.com
The Establishment of Earthquake
Information System Based on GIS
Emergency
Command
Jun ZENG 1, 2,, De ZHANG1, 2
1. Surveying and Mapping Institute, Information Engineering University, 450052, P.R.China
2. Xi’an Research Institute of Surveying and Mapping, Xi’an 710054, Shannxi, P.R.China
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
Earthquake emergency command,
Disaster situation representation,
Rapid response
It is a powerful guarantee to establish a full-functioned and effective earthquake emergency
command information system for the government realizing earthquake-preventing, disaster
reduction, rapid response and scientific decision-making. This paper discusses an architecture
which is composed of C/S and B/S of earthquake emergency command information system
and details the main functions and techniques of the data service layer, application service
layer, web service layer and client application layer. Based on the GIS platform, the system
can integrate the disaster information, predict scheme, command and dispatch with the
geographic information. It is beneficial for the governor to accurately master the disaster
situation and make commands scientifically.
© ST. PLUM-BLOSSOM PRESS PTY LTD
1 Introduction
There are three main measures to deal with the earthquake disaster in the world. One is to strengthen the earthquake prediction.
Second is to enhance the quality of building, and third is to improve the efficiency of the emergency command and rescue during the
time of earthquake. But viewed from the situation of earthquake-preventing and disaster reducing, it is impossible to solve the
difficult problems of earthquake prediction and complete the anti-earthquake project in a short time. So, in general, some measures to
enhance the emergency command capacity are adopted to relieve the disaster as much as possible and stable the social order in the
disaster zone.
Taking GIS as the basic platform, the earthquake emergency command information system is a technical system which provides
anti-earthquake and disaster relief services to the government. It owns various functions, such as earthquake information acquisition,
fast assessment, predict scheme management, earthquake resource management, geographic data management, task plot, command
and control, emergency collaboration, disaster situation presentation, information release, information query and so on. It is a tool for
the governor and the expert to execute the disaster analysis and emergency command, and a platform for the civilians to cognize the
disaster and know of the rescue progress.

Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected]
English edition copyright © ST. PLUM-BLOSSOM PRESS PTY LTD
DOI: 10.5503/J.ME.2012.07.006
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2 The Construction of Emergency Command Information System
2.1 The architecture of system
In order to not only meet the needs of data and system maintenance in LAN and implementing professional and advanced analysis,
but also meet the needs of earthquake information release on Internet/ Intranet and the civilian’s disaster information query, the
earthquake emergency command system adopts a combination architecture [1] which takes the C/S as the main structure and the B/S
as the auxiliary. Its architecture is as figure 1.
Figure 1 The architecture of system
The C/S architecture has three layers: data service layer, application service layer and client application layer and adopts the mode of
fat client and thin server. Taking the data management as an example, which includes data defining, query, edit and update, the data
management is run in database server and in the client, and the system application is implemented by client software. When the client
sends data request to the database server, the server executes the query operation or other business logic. Next, it obtains the data
which includes basic geographic information and earthquake thematic data from the database, then send the information and data to
the client. The client completes the application function of data. The client also can extract the data subsets from the database server
and store them locally to establish the local database. So the system can run separately from the database server to meet the needs of
mobile user and front command post to execute tasks.
The B/S architecture adopts four layers, namely, the data service layer, application service layer, web service layer and browser
application layer in the client. Utilizing the B/S mode, the data query and function release is implemented by the software in the
browser. In the B/S mode, the program of business department in the client is designed as universal software, but the function nodes
and their interior functions are privilege-limited. By the authorization, different customer is authorized different function according
his or her privilege, then, he or she cannot use the other functions. So it can fulfill the task responsibility and enhance the data safety.
2.2 Data service layer
The earthquake emergency database is responsible for the storage of basic geographic data and different kinds of earthquake and
geology thematic data and provides the necessary data for the query and dispatch of the earthquake preventing and disaster relief
material, predict scheme representation, disaster analysis, command and control.
2.2.1 The architecture of database management system
The emergency database manages the data by relational database management system. The spatial data management utilizes ESRI
ArcSDE. ArcSDE is a kind of data access middleware, which can safely and effectively access the distributed geographic database [2].
The architecture of this emergency database management system is as figure 2.
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Client Application
ArcSDE client
(Indirect)
ArcSDE client
(Direct)
ArcSDE application server
TCP/IP
SQL command
SQL
SQL engine
Storage management
Data file
RDBMS
Server
Figure 2 The architecture of database
management system
2.2.2 The construction flow of database
The data managed by the system includes multi-scale basic topographic data, remote sensing image, DEM data, attribute data,
multimedia data, earthquake and geology thematic data and so on. These data are stored in the Geodatabase in the form of
FeatureDataset. The management, index and dispatch of data are executed by ArcSDE.
The design process of Geodatabase includes: use view modeling, entity and relation defining, entity representation determination,
matching with Geodatabase model, geographic dataset organization. The former three processes are conceptual modeling process.
They are not involved in concrete modeling and don’t need to consider the type of database model. The latter two processes are the
logic data modeling. Their concrete processes are as follows:
First, the geographic entity is represented as Geodatabase model. Its contents include: the determination of the representation type of
every kind of geographic entity and topologic relationship, the definition of attribute field of every kind of entity.
Secondly, the data is stored in the geodatabase. It includes classifying the features into class and subclass, determining the topologic
relationship of features, establishing the geographic dataset and combining the feature dataset and data class.
For the digital topographic map, the process steps from the original data to final data in database should include original data
checking, layer merging, data format converting, map sheet joining in the same scale, plane topology and geometric network
constructing and so on. In every process step, the data should be checked in order to control the quality and precision of data. The
work flow of putting topologic map data into database is as figure 3.
2.2.3 The security mechanism of geographic database
ArcSDE utilizes the security means of database to ensure the safety of geographic data. It does not share data in file system. The user
can’t copy and delete dataset and only can access data by data interface to guarantee the legality of data access. ArcSDE provides a
series of commands to authorize data access. So, it is convenient to authorization management and provides data backup mechanism
to safeguard geographic data and its utility.
2.3 Application service layer and web service layer
2.3.1 Application service layer
The application service layer includes basic GIS service, emergency data service, business logic service, application module service
and so on. The basic GIS service provides basic information analysis service. The emergency data service mainly is geographic data
service which is implemented by ArcSDE. The business logical service provides the methods that the system needs. The client
completes the business work by calling the methods. The application modules include a series of analytic computing module, such as
earthquake disaster assessment module which provides the destroy prediction of city building and lifeline engineering, the
assessment of subordinate disaster, economic loss and the civilian casualty [3]. By utilizing these modules, the client can realize more
complicate analysis.
2.3.2 Web service layer
The web service layer is the special layer of B/S in the system. It adopts such tools as WSDL (Web Service Definition Language),
UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and techniques to describe,
register and release any kind service provided by the application layer. This layer is transparent to the client. It separates the client
layer from the application service layer. The user’s request of server is packed as SOAP package through the network and sent to web
service layer. After received the package, the web service layer unpacks it and extracts the request information. Then the service layer
sends the information to the application service by the special communication means of the application service layer. After the
application service layer replies the user with the demanded data, the demanded data is packed as the SOAP package by the web
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service and returned to the user. Meanwhile, the web service can realize load balance management. When many users need to access
application server at the same time, the information requests can be effectively sent to different servers [4].
2.4 Client application layer
The internet\intranet is based on B/S architecture. The client accesses the servers by TCP/IP, SOAP in the form of web page. The
client is used by the public. It displays the disaster information (see figure 4) released by the command information center and also
can execute such simple operations based on GIS as basic map operation (zoom, roam, query), map analysis (buffer analysis,
distance and area analysis) and so on. Through these functions, the public can rapidly inquire the spatial position and attribute
information related with the earthquake-preventing and disaster reduction on map.
ArcGIS Desktop
Original topographic map data
toolkit
Need to check the spatial attribute and coordinate
before and after data conversion
Map layer merge
ArcCatalog
Format conversion
Need to note the
layer’s source
ArcCatalog
ArcCatalog
Map sheet join
Topology reconstruct
ArcCatalog
The attribute data should
be consistent before and
after topology reconstruct
Check data before and
after it is put into the
database in order to
guarantee its consistence
Put data into database
Figure 3 The work flow of putting topologic map data into database
Figure 4 Disaster situation release map
Figure 5 Civilian evacuation route map
The LAN is based on C/S architecture. The client is divided into two kinds. One is for the business department staff to do some daily
maintenance, such as the update of earthquake emergency data, network control, user’s privilege management and so on. The other is
for the leader and earthquake expert. This kind of client integrates the main subsystem and function modules of emergency command
for disaster assessment, emergency command and decision-making. The command control subsystem is composed by the modules
such as command and control, resource management, command and communication, monitoring and display. The command and
control module is responsible for the planning, information sending down, monitoring, canceling and modification of task. The
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resource management module is responsible for resource allotting and dispatch, monitoring and warning, resource supplement. The
command and communication module is responsible for the message transfer, filter control, display, message conversion and so on.
The monitoring and display module is responsible for the map display, GPS positioning, BD satellite positioning, LBS, video display,
situation plot display, communication monitoring and so on. Figure 5 shows the route of evacuating civilian.
The main function modules are as following figure 6 in LAN.
C/S client
Emergency
command
Daily business
Map
maintenance
Network
control
Privilege
management
Rapid
accessment
Scheme
management
Task plot
Command
and
dispatch
Emergency
collaboration
...
Figure 6 The main function modules of C/S client
3 Conclusion
It is the importance period 24 hours after the earthquake for rescuing, preventing subordinate disaster occurring and extending. So the
time and efficiency of the emergency command is very important and the responsibility of rescue can’t be neglected. It is very urgent
to construct a highly effective earthquake emergency command information system.
The earthquake emergency command information system provides the government technical support to rapidly cognize earthquake,
acquire the rescue information and evacuate the victims. The intelligent analytic assessment models can aid decision-making, rapidly
response, make emergency scheme and execute command and dispatch visually based on geographic spatial data. In addition, under
the visual geographic environment, the related government can collaborate smoothly. All those characteristics can remarkably
improve the comprehensive capacity of earthquake-preventing and disaster reduction.
References
[1]. ZENG Jun, et al. Emergency Information Command System for Civil Air Defense [national technical report]. Xi’an Research
Institute of Surveying and Mapping, 2009: 4-6 (in Chinese)
[2]. XIONG Lihua, YANG Feng. Application Study of Spatial Database Technology Based on ArcSDE. Computer Engineering and
Design, 2004, 24(3): 90-92 (in Chinese)
[3]. MENG Xiangrui. The Study of Web GIS-based Earthquake Prevention and Disaster Mitigation Information System. Jilin
University, 2005: 41-44 (in Chinese)
[4]. ZHONG Xiao. The Research on the GIS Application in the Earthquake Emergency System and Earthquake Information Share.
The Institute of Earthquake Predict. China Earthquake Bureau, 2006: 3-4 (in Chinese)
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