Developing a Virtual Disaster Information Management and Analysis System in Internet for Chi-Chi Earthquake

This paper presents the development of a virtual disaster information management and analysis system in Internet for Chi-Chi earthquake. This system was developed by National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) in Taiwan after Chi-Chi earthquake. The initiative of this system is to provide a virtual environment that can be used to display both spatial and feature information of the aftermath damage investigation results. It is also developed to provide related government agencies, academic and private sectors the functions of on -line disaster information management, query and analysis to the reconnaissance database compiled by NCREE. Furthermore, general publics and students can also be benefited form using this system in their distance learning activities for knowing the damage caused by Chi-Chi earthquake. The developing concept of this system is to follow the concept of Digital Earth Initiative (DEI) that integrates advanced information and network technologies, database management system and GIS technologies in Internet environment for applications development. The system was designed and implemented under the DEI concept by using Java Script Language, Microsoft SQL Server Database Management System, Cold Fusion Application Server and Autodesk Mapguide Web GIS Server. This system includes two sub-systems: 1) Disaster Information System and 2) Earthquake Reconnaissance Database Management and Analysis System. The first sub-system provides functions to general publics to derive abstract Chi-Chi Earthquake disaster information. The second sub-system was developed to provide spatial, statistical and cross-reference analysis functions to users from government agencies, academic and private sectors to acquire full contents of reconnaissance information for decision support needed by earthquake recovery activities as well as