[HOT] Including natural hazards in the HOSM data model?

Fran Boon francisboon at gmail.com
Wed Apr 4 19:39:34 BST 2012


On 4 April 2012 15:14, Stéphane Henriod <s at henriod.info> wrote:
> Most humanitarian actors agree that the best response to an emergency is
> preparedness, not only in terms of behaviors but also data. What strikes me
> when I look at HOSM data model is that I don't see anything for natural
> hazard delineation, for example. When responding to a crisis, humanitarian
> actors might want to know in advance where to expect landslides, avalanches
> and floods areas (for their own safety but also to "predict" where roads
> might be blocked or where facilities might have been affected). Seismic
> zonation is something that can be directly included in OSM; oldish data is
> freely available from the GSHAP project, while the GlobalEarthquake Model
> will provide with a more modern version in a few years.
> My question to the active and experienced members of the community is thus
> the following: would you see any relevance to develop classes for natural
> (and man-made?) hazards to be included in HOSM framework?
> As we can not expect the communities to have the technical knowledge of
> hazard scientists, the ontology would have to remain quite simple, which is
> probably ok for humanitarian actors (who cares whether it's a landslide, a
> rockfall or a debris flow? a general category "earth mass movement" might be
> sufficient for our purpose). Also, a distinction should be made between
> "usual" events (those that occur relatively frequently but that might or
> might not be currently triggered) and actual events (that have been actually
> triggered).
> Many challenges ahead but before diving into it, I would like to check with
> you if this idea has already been discussed and if it makes sense to pursue
> it.

Hi Stéphane,

I would concur with Kate that within the OSM DB doesn't seem like the
best place to store it, but rather a place where it can be overlaid
with the OSM DB.

I'd be really interested to see if Sahana would make a good place to
store this data: http://eden.sahanafoundation.org
We don't currently include Hazard data models, but rather just overlay
sources from elsewhere (typically WMS), but we would be very
interested in actually having these within the Sahana database.
I know that the Red Cross are interested in adding this to their
Sahana deployment.

Thoughts on this approach welcomed :)

Best Wishes,
Fran.



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