Diploma Thesis Matthias Müller

Interoperable Geoinformationsdienste für die multikriterielle Entscheidungsunterstützung im Katastrophen- und Risikomanagement

(Interoperable Geoinformation Services for Multi-Criteria Decision Support in Emergency Management)

Abstract

Spatial decision support is among the primary fields of application of GIS technology. The ability to conduct real-time processing of spatial data due to increasing performance of modern computer hardware is paralleled by the ability to use comfortable tools for modelling purposes. By shifting from the concept of stationary and monolithic processing towards spatial data infrastructures (SDI) a variety of distributed data sources and distributed rocessing facilities can be used to generate valuable information for decision making and share this information with many users. In our information society, risk and emergency management rely heavy on large amounts of data to evaluate measures for risk reduction prior to a disaster, to decide between different courses of action in emergency management or to develop proper mitigation strategies to recover from a disaster. Methods of multi-criteria evaluation can support and accelerate the complex process of judging many different factors during the decision process. This work presents an approach for the integration of multi-criteria evaluation into SDI relying on raster data for spatial decision support. A web service is designed that offers the required functionality at different levels of complexity using a unified taxonomy. On these foundations application profiles are be developed for wo use cases originating from current public-founded projects in the field of risk and emergency management: SoKNOS and HEREPLUS.
The succeeding prototypical implementation of a web service for spatial multi-criteria evaluation is built on top of the WPS framework from 52°North using of the Web Processing Service specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium. The geoprocessing functionality is provided by ESRI’s ArcGIS Server, different raster data formats are supported through the GDAL library. The technical feasibility of a web service for spatial evaluation is demonstrated. The resulting implementation also interoperates with different data services within its designated field of application.