The Development of an Integrated and Context-Aware WebGIS of Alerting Information

摘要

Natural disasters have been major threat to Taiwan and caused huge damages over the years. To promptly collect and convey alert messages to people threaten by disaster is thus a necessary mission to the government. Because alert messages are issued by different responsible agencies, users are forced to deal with heterogeneous format of information to establish a complete and comprehensive understanding. Meanwhile, the alert messages are time and location dependent, making it much more complicated to deal with. Efforts for standardizing the alerting messages have been conducted, for example, Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), etc. This paper discusses the design of an integrated WebGIS system that interprets alert messages following different alert standards and conveys context-aware information according to users' changing status. The open and standardized framework provides additional advantages of simplifying the duties and actions of responsible agencies and creating a flexible, expandable and interoperable application infrastructure for the general public. With timely and standardized alert messages available, more lives can be saved and damages can be effectively reduced.