A Veterinary Web-GIS to manage non-epidemic emergencies in Italy
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Experimental Zooprophylactic Institute of Abruzzo and Molise G. Caporale, Italy
Worldwide natural disasters are growing in frequency, complexity, severity and are exacerbated by challenges such as climate changes (1). During large scale disasters, information about affected people, infrastructure and resources need to be urgently handled by multiple organizations that produce and share considerable amounts of data during response efforts. In spite of this, the majority of information is still provided as written reports, PowerPoint slides or tables in various formats. Consequently, a relevant amount of time is needed to collect and combine all the information into a comprehensive situational overview allowing all involved actors to meet their needs and responsibilities (2, 3). However, the recently increased power of technology, together with advanced informatics tools, have facilitated the collection and sharing of standardized data (INSPIRE: https://inspire.ec.europa.eu/). In particular, GIS, remote sensing and the Internet have had a significant impact, and are currently used in a variety of ways during all phases of disaster management (4). Integrating these technologies to create a spatial decision support system offers new possibilities for disaster management, particularly during the initial response phase, when the ability to detect changes is more urgent and the access to relevant information and spatial data is among the most essential requirements (5, 6, 7). GIS synthesizes information from a vast number of different data resources and helps in assessing disaster impact, plan response and relief strategies. The need for using this system also in the field of veterinary medicine has been emerging during the last decade (8). In fact, in the event of natural disasters, Veterinary Services are directly involved in the response and recovery phases when farms and companion animals are affected during Non-Epidemic Emergencies.
During the past non-epidemic emergencies occurred in central Italy (e.g. the earthquakes of Aquila 2009 and Amatrice 2016) the National Reference Centre for Urban Hygiene and Non-Epidemic Emergencies (IUVENE)’s information system has proven to be a fundamental operational tool that ensured coherent and harmonized data collection on the main criticalities notified at farm, food establishments and feed industries levels. It also allowed the monitoring and the verification of different actions undertaken, their effectiveness and it also made it possible to rapidly put in place proper corrective measures in various disasters scenario. However, there was the need for a new system’s design, technologically more advanced, more flexible and friendly, redesigned to manage different kind of hazards on the entire national territory. To achieve this purpose, SIVENE, an innovative web application able to respond to specific identified needs in the context of non-epidemic emergencies, has been designed. The new information system allows users to manage, display and analyse data and information generated by the Veterinary Services involved in the response and recovery phases.
For the development of SIVENE a specific attention was paid to some features that are extremely useful during the management of an emergency, in particular:
• the possibility of using the application on mobile devices (tablets and smartphones);
• the possibility to dynamically generate the inspection check-lists defined during emergencies;
• a natural integration with the web-GIS.
The new information system was developed according to a multilevel (or multi-layer) architecture, as shown in Figure 1. This architecture guarantees greater flexibility and independence in the implementation of the software application and the possibility of decoupling the various components of the application itself.
From the application point of view the SIVENE system is composed of a public and a private area. The public area can be useful for the publication and dissemination of news and information relating to the emergency. The private section instead allows only authorized users, to access the operational functions of the System. The information system was also equipped with an ad-hoc engine for the dynamic creation of checklists, that is all the forms accompanying the application for collecting specific information in the control and inspection activities carried out by the competent operators in case of emergency.
The geospatial analysis and visualization play a fundamental role in the early warning and post-event emergency management. Consequently, basic spatial information and thematic maps are stored and managed into a geospatial database purposely implemented, so that it is possible to display, analyze, and query the data by means of a map viewer. Figure 1 shows the GIS system architecture schema integrating Geodatabase, GIS, and web-GIS.
The Geodatabase has been designed to manage and integrate geospatial data provided as input to the system, including the alphanumeric data related to:
1. emergency events: magnitude and epicenter of the event, the seismic hazard map recorded and processed by the Civil Protection Department – CPD, and the estimated seismic livestock vulnerability;
2. exposed elements: holdings, livestock structures and their relevant attributes, extracted from the Italian National Database for Animal Identification and Registration (NDB);
3. basic geographic layers: regions, municipalities, and a bunch of base map tiles by ESRI®.
The technologies chosen to implement the Geodatabase was Oracle RDBMS 11 g.
The GIS, in direct connection with the Geodatabase, is devoted to process geographical data and spatial information. By means of spatial analysis procedures and geo-processing operations, this section provides a complete and updated description of the study area, through the animal density per species with a spatial resolution of 1 km using a Kernel Density function with a radius of 15 km (9) and the map of estimated seismic livestock vulnerability. The software package chosen to implement the GIS section was ESRI® ArcGIS Desktop 10.5. Finally, the web-GIS application has been designed mixing open source and proprietary technologies in a client-server architecture, which guarantees maximum flexibility and the possibility to easily integrate spatial data coming from different sources and formats. The server-side part consists in an ESRI ArcGIS Server connected to the Oracle RDBMS to expose the spatial data as a series of ReST mapservices. The mapservices are consumed by a JavaScript client realized with the open source library OpenLayers to develop the GIS functions and the Bootstrap CSS Framework to create custom UI widgets. The web-GIS application has been deployed in a J2EE Environment using the Tomcat Application Server. The datasets collected in the Geodatabase and displayed by the web-GIS are summarized in Figure 2.
The SIVENE web application allows to dynamically create specific checklists able to gather the information needed during an emergency. The Veterinary Services or other competent authority, during the inspection of farms, stables or other structures, can collect (both in on-line or off-line mode) data regarding the situation of buildings, the facilities, the health status of animals, the supporting infrastructure, etc. using an ad-hoc survey form, provided by the application.
The SIVENE web GIS is a strategic tool – at local, regional and national level – for the defi¬nition of vulnerability and damage scenarios, according to the type of emergency. The web GIS application collects, manages and visualizes data of veterinary interest, maps of estimated vulnerability and damage for emergency information management (Figure 3).
Veterinary Services are always more involved in crises. National decision-support systems for non-epidemic veterinary emergencies are still missing. SIVENE can be used for emergency planning, response and recovery to facilitate decision-making. In the next future, SIVENE will be fully integrated in the National Information Platform managed by the Italian Civil Protection. In addition SIVENE will be enriched by the maps provided by the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (Copernicus EMS - https://emergency.copernicus.eu) which supplies information for emergency response in relation to different types of disasters.
References
1. Annual report of the European Union's humanitarian aid and civil protection policies and their implementation in 2015. http://ec.europa.eu/echo/files/media/publications/annual_report/2015/en.pdf. Accessed February, 15 2019.
2. Neuvel JMM, Scholten HJ, van den Brink A. From Spatial Data to Synchronised Actions: The Network-centric Organisation of Spatial Decision Support for Risk and Emergency Management. Appl Spat Anal Polic. 2012; 5(1):51–72.
3. Breen JJ, Parrish DR. GIS in Emergency Management Cultures: An Empirical Approach to Understanding Inter-and Intra-Agency Communication During Emergencies. JHSEM. 2013; 10(2):477 – 495.
4. Pollino M, Fattoruso G, Della Rocca AB, La Porta L, Lo Curzio S, Arolchi A, James V, and Pascale C. An Open Source GIS System for Earthquake Early Warning and Post-Event Emergency Management. International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications ICCSA 2011 pp 376-391.
5. Vijay B. Sudhanshu J, Deshmukh NK, et al. Assessment of role of GIS for natural disaster management: a critical review. Int J Innov Res Sci Eng. 2013;2(10):5630-5632.
6. Sam Herold, M. Sawada and Barry Wellar, 2005. Integrating Geographic Information Systems, Spatial Databases and the Internet: A Framework for Disaster Management. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/citations?doi=10.1.1.92.213.
7. Hay SI. An overview of remote sensing and geodesy for epidemiology and public health applications. Ad Parasitol. 2000; 47: 1-35.
8. Mengistu TS, Haile AW. Review on the Application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in Veterinary Medicine. Int J Vet Health Sci Res. 2017; 5(4): 176-182.
9. Silverman BW. Density Estimation for Statistics and Data Analysis. New York: Chapman and Hall/CRC. 1986.
Keywords:
Livestock,
Information System,
Decision Support System - DSS,
WebGIS,
ESRI ArcGIS,
OpenLayers,
veterinary emergencies,
Non-epidemic emergencies
Conference:
GeoVet 2019. Novel spatio-temporal approaches in the era of Big Data, Davis, United States, 8 Oct - 10 Oct, 2019.
Presentation Type:
Regular oral presentation
Topic:
Operational GIS tools for policy-makers, planners, researchers
Citation:
Di Lorenzo
A,
Savini
L,
Tora
S,
Migliaccio
P,
Dalla Villa
P,
Morelli
D,
D'Alterio
N and
Conte
A
(2019). A Veterinary Web-GIS to manage non-epidemic emergencies in Italy.
Front. Vet. Sci.
Conference Abstract:
GeoVet 2019. Novel spatio-temporal approaches in the era of Big Data.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fvets.2019.05.00039
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Received:
28 Aug 2019;
Published Online:
27 Sep 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Alessio Di Lorenzo, Experimental Zooprophylactic Institute of Abruzzo and Molise G. Caporale, Teramo, Abruzzo, Italy, a.dilorenzo@izs.it