A Geospatial Service Approach towards the Development of a Debris Flow Early-warning Systems

Disaster prevention and management is a complicated task that often involves a tremendous volume of heterogeneous data from various resources. With its dynamic and distributed nature, service technology appears to be a good candidate for removing the communication barriers between various organizations and for facilitating the integration and sharing of distributed data. For it to succeed, however, a consensus agreement on how geospatial data is distributed and processed must be first established. In the GIS (Geographic Information System) domain, the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) has proposed service standards like WMS, WFS, WCS, and WPS to serve as the foundation for the distribution and processing of geospatial data in an open and interoperable way, but how service technology can fit into current applications is left for domain developers to explore. A service-based system prototype for debris flow early-warning systems is proposed and tested in this paper. This task typically requires heterogeneous geospatial datasets from various organizations to be dynamically acquired and integrated, some of them are continuously updated during the process. The practical implementation indicates that the proposed architecture can meet the demands of the distribution of heterogeneous geospatial data and instantaneous data exchange. Compared to the traditional manual batch-processing approach, the service-based approach also offers better interoperability regarding the distribution and processing of geospatial data.