Community Base Flood Information System

Abstract

Floods are among the country the most frequent and costly natural disasters in terms of human hardship and economic loss. The existing flood mitigation system is the structural method undoubtedly; these measures are very expensive and time consuming which involves physical work like construction of dams, reservoirs, bridges, channel improvement, river diversion and other embankments to keep floods away from people. Those structural methods have been failed by inefficient operation. Non structural method of mitigation influences the adopting of information and communication technology specially the internet technology and World Wide Web. As a result non structural methods are considered as timeliness, rapid response and effective information dissemination method to keep people away from floods. Among the non structural method such as flood forecasting and the association with real time data collection system has been found favor with countries prone to flood hazard. Flood risk mapping is required to provide information about flood risked area to resident in flood prone area to establish flood protection and evacuation system. Flood information system is a spatial data based system for disaster management activities in disaster mitigation and preparedness programs. Therefore, the development of Community Base Flood Information System is a very strategy decision to increase public awareness of the risks that natural hazards and related environmental disasters pose to communities, societies and economies in the Island wide. The purpose of Flood Information System is to visualize hazards, vulnerabilities and risks associated with flood hazards in one application and offers new cognitions to the user. This research presents the design of Community Base Flood Information System where it starts with a concept of Flood Information System that is a web based Geographic Information System (GIS) represents the map visualizations of the flood disaster risk in the area flood prone with over laying in to the Google map. The user and system requirements, and obtain hardware and software requirements has been analyzed for implementation of Community Base Flood Information System. Users are not only get flood information system but also they can search sum local features such as village name, school names, hotels and historical pace etc. in the Google map. Further more find the neighborhood places, user can enter the place location and name in to the data base too. But authorized users only can enter the current water level in the database This research introduces a framework of implementing a Web-based GIS using Open Source Software, including PostgreSQL/PostGIS, MapServer, and OpenLayers. On the server side, PostgreSQL/PostGIS is used to store and process spatial data. MapServer is adopted to provide Web Mapping Service (WMS). Server side scripting language PHP is employed to dynamically generate map file from PostGIS for MapServer to render. On the client side, OpenLayers provides the programming interface to incorporate layers from different data sources. Web-based GIS for flood information system, as an example, has been developed to demonstrate both merits and demerits of adopting this project work.