DI-DAP: An Efficient Disaster Information Delivery and Analysis Platform in Disaster Management

In disaster management, people are interested in the development and the evolution of the disasters. If they intend to track the information of the disaster, they will be overwhelmed by the large number of disaster-related documents, microblogs, and news, etc. To support disaster management and minimize the loss during the disaster, it is necessary to efficiently and effectively collect, deliver, summarize, and analyze the disaster information, letting people in affected area quickly gain an overview of the disaster situation and improve their situational awareness. To present an integrated solution to address the information explosion problem during the disaster period, we designed and implemented DI-DAP, an efficient and effective disaster information delivery and analysis platform. DI-DAP is an information centric information platform aiming to provide convenient, interactive, and timely disaster information to the users in need. It is composed of three separated but complementary services: Disaster Vertical Search Engine, Disaster Storyline Generation, and Geo-Spatial Data Analysis Portal. These services provide a specific set of functionalities to enable users to consume highly summarized information and allow them to conduct ad-hoc geospatial information retrieval tasks. To support these services, DI-DAP adopts FIU-Miner, a fast, integrated, and user-friendly data analysis platform, which encapsulated all the computation and analysis workflow as well-defined tasks. Moreover, to enable ad-hoc geospatial information retrieval, an advanced query language MapQL is used and the query template engine is integrated. DI-DAP is designed and implemented as a disaster management tool and is currently been exercised as the disaster information platform by more than 100 companies and institutions in South Florida area.