This paper presents the concept of an ICT tool for collecting existing knowledge in the population on historic natural disasters, and an organizational concept for making this knowledge and experience usable for risk and crisis communication, and discussions with relevant decision makers including politicians. A key focus of the proposed solution is the systematic collection of qualitative information on past natural disasters using a citizen science approach: what did previous disasters actually mean for the everyday lives of the citizens, what was the concrete damage caused by the disaster and what did this damage look like, how did the disasters impact people's safety, their wellbeing, and their economic activities, what type of help was needed (and missing) when the disaster struck, where was it needed, how could people have better prepared themselves, how did the affected population cope with the disaster, what were successful (or unsuccessful) coping strategies. In order to achieve these goals, the proposed software will be able to enrich existing quantitative information on disasters with qualitative experiences in the form of live cases narrated by survivors, and historic (multi) media documentations such as texts, photographs and films on disasters. In order to make this information usable, relevant meta data will be acquired and provided for each contribution, and the information will be archived in an easy to use data base, that allows for an intuitive (visual) presentation of its inputs. In order to assure that a critical amount of input is generated
(and used), an organizational concept involving educational institutions like schools, and universities, as well as volunteer organizations is proposed. The expected advantage of the proposed approach is that it will become clearer to all stake holders what a disaster actually means for the everyday lives of the population. Instead of just relying on disaster statistics, the impact of a potential disaster becomes audible and visible. Multimedia materials from the system can be used to create exhibitions on the local relevance of disasters, which can be used to communicate existing risks to (younger) citizens, as well as politicians and other decision makers.
Dieser Beitrag präsentiert das Konzept einer Software, mit deren Hilfe in der Bevölkerung vorhandenes Wissen über in der Vergangenheit eingetretene Naturkatastrophen systematisch erfasst werden kann. Zudem wird ein organisatorisches Konzept vorgestellt, mit dessen Hilfe sich die vorgeschlagene Software in der Praxis effizient einsetzen lässt. Dabei wird ein „Citizen-Science“-Ansatz verfolgt, der darauf abzielt, insbesondere qualitative Informationen zu vergangenen Naturkatastrophen systematisch zu erheben: wie wirkten sich die Naturkatastrophen auf das alltägliche Leben aus, wie sahen die angerichteten Schäden aus, wie beeinflusste die Katastrophe die Sicherheit, das Wohlbefinden und die wirtschaftlichen Aktivitäten, welche Hilfe wurde wann wo benötigt (und war ggf. nicht verfügbar), was waren erfolgreiche (oder auch weniger erfolgreiche) Krisenbewältigungsstrategien, was hätte man tun können, um sich besser auf die Katastrophe vorzubereiten. Um diese Ziele zu erreichen, reichert die vorgeschlagene Software vorhandene quantitative Informationen zu Naturkatastrophen mit subjektiven Erfahrungen Überlebender in Form von (Audio-)Berichten an und archiviert vorhandene historische multimediale Materialien wie Fotos, Film- und Textbeiträge über die vergangenen Katastrophen. Um diese Informationen nutzbar zu machen, müssen bei der Dateneingabe für jeden Beitrag relevante Metadaten erfasst werden. Zudem sollen die in einer Datenbank erfassten Inhalte über ein Front-End wie z. B. eine Webseite zugänglich sein, wobei besonderer Wert auf eine intuitive visuelle Repräsentation der Inhalte gelegt wird. Um sicher zu stellen, dass für die jeweilige Anwendungsregion auch eine ausreichende Menge an Beiträgen generiert wird, schlagen die Autoren ergänzend ein organisatorisches Konzept vor, das auf einer Zusammenarbeit mit Schulen, Hochschulen und Freiwilligenorganisationen aufbaut. Vorteil des hier präsentierten Ansatzes ist es, dass allen Stakeholdern, aber auch den Bürgern deutlicher wird, was die lokal relevanten Naturkatastrophen für die Bevölkerung konkret bedeuten, da die Auswirkungen hörbar und sichtbar werden. Die vorhandenen multimedialen Materialien aus der Datenbank können dann vor Ort dazu genutzt werden, die Risikokommunikation zu unterstützen (zum Beispiel durch den Download als Unterrichtsmaterial, aber auch durch die Nutzung der Materialien in Ausstellungen zu den örtlich bedeutsamen Naturkatastrophen).
Existing technical solutions that ask citizens to provide information on disasters focus
on the present and the future.
In order to address existing information gaps on historic disasters, we propose an easyto-use technical solution (for information collection, retrieval, and presentation), and an organizational concept how the tool can be embedded in existing risk-communication and urban planning strategies.
The goal of the organizational concept is to motivate citizens to participate in the data
collection effort by providing eyewitness accounts and historic media material on
highimpact, low-frequency disasters. The organizational concept will be based on the
following approaches:
• Data collection activities will be included in courses at universities and higher
educational institutions. This can be achieved as part of courses on risk and
crisis communication, urban planning, or disaster management. Media projects
conducted as part of journalism and media science programs can also collect
and use information on historic disasters to create exhibitions or multimedia
features on disaster types of regional relevance. The feasibility of this approach
has been shown – among others – by [
Finally, these activities shall be extended by workshops or townhall meetings to initiate
a dialogue between local government and citizens, in order to discuss disaster
prevention measures, as well as measures for adaptation to climate change. This
socalled social participation approach mobilizes the society to participate in the changes
to be made in a given area. The approach is also required by the Aarhus Convention,
which imposes a duty to inform the society about decisions connected with the natural
environment and having an effect on the functioning of social groups
[Sobiesiak200
Penszko 2013]. As a result, (trustful) relations are established between the public
administration and the citizens, and decision makers gain additional knowledge and
experience which they do not possess yet [
As proposed in [
In order to support the organizational approach, an information system to collect and provide qualitative information on historic natural disasters has to be developed. This technical solution should comprise • • • an easy-to-use smartphone app and website that allows volunteers (or elderly people themselves) to collect, categorize, and visualize information on and experiences with past disasters, such as historic photos, eyewitness reports on disaster impact or on historic observations from nature, drawings, sketches, etc. a back-end for information storage, including a tool used by moderators to validate and approve new users, as well as entries into the data base, a website for information retrieval (both using map-based multimedia presentations as well as a functionality for the download of specific content).
In order to implement the proposed solution, the authors propose a layeredarchitecture as illustrated in Figure-1. The architecture comprises four main layers, which are described as follows: • • • a. Data acquisition layer.
The bottom layer of the architecture is the data acquisition layer. Devices to acquire data will mainly be smartphones or desktop computers, which will be used to upload photographs, text, audio files, etc. Smartphones are well suited for data acquisition by volunteers who visit disaster survivors, and they usually provide functionalities for content collection such as microphones for audio recording and a camera. However, some initial discussions with seniors who experienced disasters indicate that this target group may prefer stationary computers to provide their multimedia contributions to the system, so that both a mobile and a desktop version of the data collection tool are needed. Please note that some basic meta data on the multimedia materials is also collected in this layer. b. Communication layer.
The communication layer supports the connectivity of data acquisition devices with the data base, using protocols such as TCP/IP (and HTTP/HTTPS and RESTful approaches on those). c. Data layer.
This layer stores the data provided by the input devices and provides the ability to process and act upon these data. This layer comprises three main components: • a verification / validation module, which performs some (automated) procedures for checking that the input data is related to disaster events and complies with minimum input requirements. • a categorization module, which uses, among others, taxonomies of disasters and timelines to further classify input materials into different contexts and situations (context-based grouping of related contributions based upon contribution properties and their metadata). This will be needed because many end-users of the systems may be laypeople (e.g. history teachers) who will not be able (or do not want to) perform sophisticated queries on the database and may want to be easily provided with material on certain situations. • a publication / selection module, which provides contextualized multimedia materials to the end-users’ front end(s). • d. Application layer.
This layer contains the application that present the database’s content to endusers like citizens, teachers, or urban planners. Initially, this shall contain a visualization component with different filters (e.g., based upon disaster types or situations), as well as a download functionality to provide multimedia materials to end-users for their further use. Future extensions to third party applications shall be possible. Please note that the application may also be used to access hardware resources in the data acquisition layer (if run on the data acquisition device).
Technology acceptance models [
This paper provides an initial idea how qualitative information and multimedia materials on historic disasters may be collected using a citizen science approach and an IT tool, and how this material may be made accessible to stakeholders such as risk communicators or urban planners. Please note that at the current state, the presented solutions display the authors’ own initial ideas, and have not yet been discussed in depth with possible end users. Once a detailed requirement analysis has been completed, the proposed approach will need to be adapted, detailed, and refined.
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Disaster Data Base. http://www.emdat.be/ (accessed March 23rd, 2018).