Digital Typhoon: near Real-time Aggregation, Recombination and Delivery of Typhoon-related Information

This paper introduces the Digital Typhoon project, whose goal is to establish the study of meteoinformatics and to develop emergency information systems in the domain of typhoon-related information. We first propose the models of emergency information systems and uses “flat-source model” as the model of emergency information systems, and explain the concepts of information aggregation, recombination, and delivery, and describe how we used these concepts in the implementation of our web site named Digital Typhoon [1]. The basic principle of information recombination is the relationship that data plus context equals information, and we introduce the notion of context generation with real examples. Next information aggregation deals with content management systems for aggregating information comparing Weblog and Wiki, and we hypothesize that the effective emergency information aggregation systems need to have the hub of information, following the proposal of our information aggregation system using weblog trackbacks. Finally information delivery describes information needs and delivery tools for Digital Typhoon, which received more than 13 million page views since July 2003.