Journal of Spatial Analysis

Accessibility to precise spatial and real time data plays a valuable role in the velocity and quality of flood relief operation and subsequently, scales the human and financial losses down. Flood real time data collection and processing, for instance, precise location and situation of flood victims may be a big challenge in Iran regarding the hardware facilities (such as high resolution aerial imagery devices) owned by the correspond organizations. To overcome the mentioned inabilities as well as reducing the financial costs for real time monitoring purpose of a flood, the current research intended to use the capacity of the flood victims and other volunteers to collect and upload real time data to rescue themselves. By means of this, flood real time spatial and non-spatial data collection is applicable via public and per-person participation based on the needs of each victims. The current Open Source workflow has been so designed that by using a browser like Mozilla, Explorer, Chrome and etc., and without the need for installing any software, the victim transmits his/her exact geographic location (captured automatically by the designed web service) and other multimedia data such as video-photo. Also, the flood-affected person announces the type of the damage and consequently, demanded rescue operation to the managers as a text information. After data processing on the server, the information is represented as a real time rescue map for decision making. The rescue plan may be mapped based on the singular aid as well as plural plan in the cluster form specialized for a particular group of victims in each bounding box. To design the web service, a client architecture for victims, other volunteers and managers has been developed, for implementing the service, Open Source technologies, server-side and client-side programming languages, Geoserver and WFS (Web Feature Service) standard adopted by OGC for spatially-enabled representation of victims demands, have been exploited. The research result is a browser-based service in which the client service offers automatic zooming to the current location of the clients and sends the rescue request including personal identifications and the type of injury using PHP (stands for Hypertext Preprocessor) and SQL (Structured Query Language). In the other side, on the client side designed for managers, the requested rescue submitted by the victims and other volunteers are mapped and displayed real time by OpenLayers and WFS. The result introduces an efficient applicable method for gathering real time and high accuracy geographic-multimedia-text data collection and consequently, extremely reduces the relief operation costs. Finally, the proposed methodology causes better performance and spatially clustering of victims to decrease the aftermath of the flood in a region like Iran suffers from the lack of expensive hardware technologies for precise data collection and transmission.