Design and Implementation of a Multi-Disaster Risk Assessment Database System in South Korea

Abstract

To cope with natural disasters and their impact, various types of risk assessment tools have been developed to assess hazards from a scientific point of view as well as the socioeconomic impacts of a hazardous event. Because most of the assessment tools have been developed using local and regional characteristics, there are limitations when applying special cases consisting of various disaster-related datasets in Korea. In this paper, we collected open data scattered among various institutions and guaranteed data interoperability through a standardization process considering various formats. In addition, this study presents a scalable design method and implementation of a database system which can be easily employed in Korean loss estimation due to natural hazards. The proposed database system will be of great help in predicting the disaster scale and degree of damage, in supporting decision-making to minimize damage, and could serve as a data platform of disaster risk reduction and prevention.Information 2020, 11, 8 2 of 19 on the degree of damage, and calculate the number of refugees and the number of people requiring shelters. To perform a loss assessment, data representing the information of the damaged area, such as buildings and population, are required. Relevant studies conduct research and analysis using data provided in the forms of files and databases by the country.In South Korea, studies are being conducted using disaster damage statistical data, relevant research data, and actual measurement data. For earthquakes; however, earthquake-related data for estimating losses are insufficient. Therefore, analyses are conducted based on HAZUS-MH, which is a loss assessment tool of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), using a large amount of accumulated actual data, earthquake-related data provided by the tool, and domestic and overseas studies. In order to utilize these specific data sets in various applications, such as HAZUS-MH or ERGO, a lot of time is required to turn the data into useful information through the initial steps of data cleaning, preparation, and preprocessing.HAZUS-MH is developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and is used in many other regions for estimating losses after natural hazards, including earthquake, flooding, fire, and hurricane. In damage estimation studies caused by natural disasters in the Korean peninsula, Kang et al.[5] estimated loss estimation by using HAZUS-MH and ShakeMap of USGS (United States Geological Survey), and Yu and Jo et al. [6,7] investigated flood loss estimation using HAZUS-MH. Besides, Scawthron and Hancilar et al. [8,9] analyzed HAZUS-MH-based loss assessment in Canada and Oman.As the earthquake-related data provided by HAZUS-MH (and the weight data used for loss assessments) reflect the environment and condition of the corresponding country, the data are different from those of the Korean environment. Therefore, it is necessary to provide proper datasets reflecting the Korean environment, such as the geological environment, s...

Data-Driven Approach for Incident Management in a Smart City

“…Since 1988, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, located in the School of Public Health at the Université Catholique de Louvain, has been developing and maintaining an Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT). Geographical, topographic, and geological data can be obtained from Geographical Information Systems (GIS) [5,[13][14][15], HAZUS [8,16], satellites [14,[16][17][18], local records [8,17,19], and social media [2,7,20]. HAZUS is a geographic information system-based natural hazard analysis tool developed and freely distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).…”