2CARE
Natural disasters are becoming more frequent, growing more severe and affecting more people than ever before. As a result, developing the tools, processes and best practices to manage natural disasters more effectively is becoming an increasingly urgent global priority. Hence, another challenge to the effectiveness of disaster management and recovery is sharing information across organizations hampered by a lack of interoperability.
In a disaster management situation, information is widely distributed and owned by different organizations, critical data is maintained in disparate systems that often don’t interoperate well, and there are no common standards to enable organizations to efficiently organize and share their resources during response, recovery and reconstruction operations. To complicate matters, disaster management teams during the relief phase may be dealing with a badly damaged infrastructure making information sharing nearly impossible and often hand-over their activities to other teams and organizations that perform the post-crisis needs assessment and reconstruction and recovery planning.
The challenge faced is not only about providing beyond state-of-art technology solutions and faster more interoperable tools as available today but also about delivering improved capabilities leading to onset of a new collaborative culture of users and organizations that are engaged in disaster management. True interoperability is about connecting people, data and diverse processes and organizations, which requires not only flexible technology and accepted standards, but also the fewest possible bureaucratic and regulatory barriers.
2CARE approach
In order to deliver the requested call objectives the 2CARE consortium proposes the following approach. To perform a gap analysis on the current “state-of-art” and an inventory of user requirements and technology enhancements from two perspectives.
- Governance and disaster management an;
- Data & information providers in support of the previous.
Carefully selected crisis cases covering different stages of the disaster management life cycle will be utilized as input for defining the user requirements and desired beyond “state-of art” technologies, processes and capabilities. Hence, in an early project stage a prototype interoperability system enabling a demonstration of the Disaster Management Interoperability Strategy (DMIS) will be implemented.
The functionality of this demonstration DMIS will developed by integrating “state-of-art” tools and geo spatial management system based on geospatial web technology in a net centric approach utilizing open source and data & geospatial information and real time location standards enabling distributed data & information curation by cloud computing and usage of social media and crowd sourcing. In such a way that Disaster response organizations systematically can manage technical and social data and geospatial and location based information from multiple sources and collaborate effectively to perform an enhanced and faster of post-crisis needs assessment and reconstruction and recovery planning.
DMIS
This first version DMIS prototype system including data & information gathering tools will be enhanced based on the user requirements and migrated to the beyond “state-of-art” by performing test in a controlled simulation environment and validating operational usability and impact on disaster management by applying is on real life crisis in selected crisis countries. Hence the development and enhancement of prototype tools and DMIS development will be performed in an iterative process in order to ensure demand driven development and maximize user buy-in and acceptance.
The project deliverables and expected impact will be a validated DMIS prototype system including technologically improved, faster more interoperable tools capable of delivering enhanced capabilities in order to help communities to rebuild most effectively after a disaster and hence providing added value to users, professionals, donors, investors, auditors, decision makers and the general public.
