Geography Network for Sharing Geospatial Information in Disaster Management

The Chuetsu earthquake restoration and revival support geographic information system (GIS) project was launched after the 2004 Chuetsu earthquake. It was the first project to gather disaster GIS data at one place, and provide them by Web GIS from off–site of the disaster site in Japan. To facilitate sharing disaster geospatial information, we introduced a framework of Geography Network as GIS portal. The GIS portal was based on loosely–coupled system architecture. Therefore, it was able to change the system structure by system requirement of the project. The GIS portal was used continuously and commonly for the 2005 Fukuoka Earthquake and 2005–2006 Heavy Snow Disaster and the 2007 Chuetsu-Oki Earthquake. In this paper, we define the system requirement to share disaster geospatial information by knowledge from case studies, and describe a practical method to build the framework, demonstrate the benefit from the framework.