WebGis Architectures for Emergency Response

In the era of information internet is the main source from which to find anything. The story of internet is recent and brief, about 20 years, during which it has evolved continuously and quickly. The information given in the first years was flat like pure text or documents but in the last 10 years the type of information shared has changed, moving to other dimensions from the flat page. Now we can experience videos, music and even maps. The concept of attaching geographic information to the information itself has spread on almost every site. Maps are everywhere because the question “where does this come from?” has assumed the same importance as the “what”. Georeferencing and managing spatial information is not the same as managing non spatial information because there is an increase in complexity due to the fact that geographic information is not absolute. In the world there are thousands of “spatial reference systems” (srs) and different standards on how to share spatial data. Whoever hosts spatial data must allow the gathering of data in different formats and different “srs”. On the other hand there is the fact that with spatial data we can perform spatial analysis such as distance calculations, routing or proximity. Many services which deal with spatial data even offer some additional services such as Google Maps. In many cases the web spatial information is gaining much importance, paper maps have always been used to plan the environment and the actions on it, but digital mapping allows more degrees of freedom granting the ability to customize what we want and how we want it presented wherever we are. The case of humanitarian emergencies is the core example about how the management of information and the usage of it are totally displaced. Whoever manages and keeps spatial data can be in a HQ office and people in the field can use information without worrying about getting it physically. The only thing needed is an internet link, which now is granted by satellite communication even if on the ground there is lack of infrastructures. This PhD thesis has been developed in the framework of the collaboration between Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action (ITHACA), a non profit association founded by the Politecnico di Torino and the Istituto Superiore per i Sistemi Territoriali e l'Innovazione (SITI) and the World Food Programme (WFP). The collaboration with the WFP characterizes the research projects in the field of humanitarian emergencies and the goal of the present thesis. One of the core things that determine a good emergency response is data availability. This term means both immediate availability after the event and quality availability, having the most up to date and precise data. To meet the challenge of rapid WebGis development and data sharing in case of emergency, this work has focused on the development of an architecture composed by Open Source tools integrated and tuned to allow the building of WebGis and web applications in short time but maintaining an high level of customization. The panorama in the geographic Open Source community is populated by several tools dedicated to specific tasks like data publishing, data management or user interface; however these projects have always been independent from each other without a common design able to harmonize the efforts in one single tool. The idea is to have a unique server architecture composed of data publishing and management systems able to output data in different ways based on the web HTTP protocol and respecting international standards. Web applications should act as custom views on the architecture and web services should allow access to data regardless of the requesting source. The development process has involved deep research into basic informatic tools and operating systems as well as high level programming languages. Following several web applications, an environment able to manage different technologies and data sources has been built. The goal is to test the proposed solution during real case studies in order to exploit usability, stability as well as effectiveness during emergency.