Journal of Spatial Analysis

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The term "Game GIS” implies to real spatially enabled games in which a special part of the world is virtually simulated, represented and managed. In fact, game GIS is an integrated system consists of video games and geographical information systems, aimed to simulate and representing spatially enabled environment. The achieved result of implementing a game GIS service can be exploited before a crisis for wise designing of a city and diminution of the aftermath casualties. As the decision making process plays the key role to reduce the losses, the need arises for using the models as much as close to the reality. By this, it is possible to use the virtual world in in the form of a game rather than experiencing the real world with real wounded and killed persons in. This enables us to recognize and manage a test environment for promoting the managing the real environment of a city during and before a natural hazard disaster like an earthquake. The game GIS may be counted as a service for sharing and dissemination of spatial information as well as online GIS to have a visual and synoptic management of the earth plant facing various disasters. The current research is aimed to design and implement a software architecture for an earthquake game in Tabriz city (Iran).

The study area is district 10 of Tabriz located within a fault zone. According to field surveys, 82.1 percent of buildings in the study area may be vulnerable against earthquake in terms of the quality of building construction.

Methodology of the research to design, program and implement the game GIS service are undertaken as the following processes: data collection, database creation and software production.

The collected data includes master plan maps of the district 10, building quality, number of floors, building façade materials, age of building, street network (adopted from the master plan of Tabriz) and population of each parcel.  Also, some regions are assumed as hospital, relief-rescue center and treasury money.

To design the software, 2D environment of MapControl and for implementing the game into the 2D environment, ArcEngine of ArcGIS have been exploited. The mentioned engine gives us possibility to use of analysis and modelling capabilities as much as closer to the ground reality which are compatible with available geometry of the terrain (Amirian, 2013, 17-19). The MapControl is a framework in which the map and game area are displayed. Symbology is used to show the persons as well as equipments. Briefly, the stages undertaken during the current research can be explained as the following:

• Data collection based on available sources via field surveying.
• Data processing and creating a database from street networks and building owned the age, materials, floors fields.
• Calculation of vulnerability rate for each building separately as well as the amount of deconstruction damage per Richter.
• Drawing the street and alley network to prepare network analysis dataset.
• Preparing special network analysis database and evaluation in various situations.
• Using the gained layers and implementation of the scenario.

After that, the conceptual architecture of the software has been designed based on the scenario.

The game GIS services has been designed with 6 different classes offer numerous functionalities responsible for displaying program commands and different views of the game. Finally, the service is designed and implemented in a real schema for crisis management application. The resulted game is played in 4 stages. In the first stage, the player starts with a 5 Richter magnitude earthquake and ends while the player gets to 8 Richter. The designed software simulates the destruction rate of buildings based on the influential factors, wounded transfer routing and rescue operation. The game player gains credit according to his quickness and agility. The player would go to the next stage with one Richter magnitude higher, if gains enough credits during each stage. The result of the current research as a Game GIS service, can be used in earthquake simulation happens in various magnitudes for management of decreasing the effects of earthquake, quick reaction, maneuver and education. Considering the achieved results, designing and performing the game GIS service over the web based on open source technologies rather than being desktop and commercial service, can be suggested as a new research frontier for the future researchers.

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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.

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Designing and implementing a 3D indoor navigation web application
              Extended abstract
Nowadays, due to the complexity of interior space of buildings, the need arises for indoor navigation inside such spaces. Indoor navigation systems may be helpful for emergency evacuation of the crowd in natural hazards such as earthquake as well as human-made disasters. These systems can also act as a decision support system for officials. Literature survey on indoor navigation services shows that a large number of researches have been conducted around designing and implementing such systems but automatic indoor spaces topology extraction of the current building information models remains as a challenge. This research aims to introduce, design and implement a web-based indoor navigation system using CityGML data model in LOD4 (level of detail) to overcome the mentioned problem.
The architecture of the current research is a browser-based web application service such that the data model processing and graph creation is implemented on the server side, the client interface and calculated path are represented on the client side (browser). Through the CityGML data model processing, firstly, the building navigable spaces such as room floor, doors and stairs are extracted and then, each space as a node and the connections between the nodes are defined as edges, are imported to the navigation graph. Programming on the server side has been performed by Python language and web development languages including HTML (Hypertext Markup language), JavaScript, JQuery and AJAX are used on the client side. Cesium virtual globe has been exploited to display the data model and the calculated route.
To evaluate the introduced methodology and designed service, a three floor house with CityGML format in LOD4 was used as the case study. Generally, a client can request a 3D calculated path by selecting the source and destination points on the client browser. The server receives the request and returns the response as a 3D line to the client browser on the Cesium environment. In addition, a descriptive graphical user interface for visual inception of the route is offered to the users on their browser.
One of the advantages of the designed web application is that, the service is implemented on the browser. Hence, all devices equipped with a browser have possibility to run the 3D routing service. Besides the mentioned cross-platform capability, average expectation time of the graphical interface loading, data module processing and path finder module are 7.03 milliseconds, 12.42 seconds and 2.44 seconds respectively that visits a valuable criteria in emergency situations like an earthquake phenomenon. Regarding this fact that CityGML is a new data model and supported by a few software, the introduced architecture causes less implementation costs as well as automation of these systems.
 
Keywords: 3D indoor navigation, web application, interior space of buildings

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Designing a Volunteer Geographic Information-based service for rapid earth quake damages estimation


Introduction
The advent of Web 2.0 enables the users to interact and prepare free unlimited real time data. This advantage leads us to exploit Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI) for real time crisis management. Traditional estimation methods for earthquake damages are expensive and time consuming. In contrast, volunteer and web-based service are near real time with almost no cost services. the lack of accessible real time data collection services causes delayed-emergency responses for disasters like an earthquake. This drawback is critical when we encounter a problem like buried people with valuable seconds for emergency rescue operation.
The current research aims to design and implement a web-based volunteer data collection service for rapid estimation of earthquake damages and number of buried people.

Methodology
To investigate the capacity of VGI in rapid estimation of earthquake, a technical frame work based on the web technologies has been programmed and implemented. The designed service is comprised of server and client sides.
The client side is a two-side browser-based service includes volunteers (users) and managers pages. On the user page, volunteers have a web page to enter and fill in the blank forms and taking a photograph of the target building and compare it with pictures. They watch the sample pictures in different level of damages and compare their building with the samples and give a grade of the most similar picture with their building. This grading process leads the server to analysis and classify the incoming data and create the heatmaps for managers. On the managers page two online discrete heatmaps for the both earthquake damages and buried people are displayed. In fact, the heatmaps present the online and real time quantitative situation of the building damages and buried persons as hot spots. These hotspots have the first priority for giving emergency services. The manager page also exploits query tools to request different level of details and classes from the server side.
The server side is responsible for receiving, saving, spatial analysis and transmission of the requested result to the client side. This task is carried out by the exchange side. As the citizens are entered to the browser-based service and fill in the blank forms for building damages based on the mentioned guideline and report the buried people, These forms are transmitted to the server side and a geo-server performs spatial analysis including Heatmap, distance and clustering analysis. Then, a real time damage and buried people map are prepared and delivered to the client side. The server updates the created maps whenever a new data is submitted. By this, a real time damage and buried people maps are accessible for official managers to conduct a goal-oriented emergency operation and a preliminary earth quake damages on city building blocks.
After the technical frame work has been designed, it was tested in Oshanvieh city by 132 volunteers on the scene for an earthquake.

Results and discussion
To investigate the capability of volunteer geographic information for earth quake afterwards, the designed service mentioned in the methodology was utilized on Oshnavieh city. It was assumed that an earthquake has occurred. 132 volunteers participated for the data collection process. According to the crisis management organization experts, 102 reports of the total 132 reports are correct that shows the accuracy of 76.52 percent. Besides the building damage level based on the defined guideline, the citizens also select their vital needs after the earthquake.
  the most requested vital needs are warm stuffs, medicine, water and foods respectively. Unfortunately, the participation rate is ranged from some seconds after the earthquake to three days. This means that some citizens have filled and transmitted their data three days after the earthquake.
In the following, a comparison between the designed service and traditional earthquake damage estimation methods (in situ) was carried out. The result shows that field-based methods for a city like Oshnavieh need about 20 days. However, the designed volunteer-based service what is programmed and implemented in the current research does this job by 3 days.

Conclusion
As the results show, the proposed service designed in this research implements the damage estimation process 6.5 times faster than the governmental procedures. This proves the efficiency of the research achievements. Besides the velocity, traditional damage estimation methods are expensive compare to volunteer-based data collection and processing which are almost free, scalable and pervasive.

Keywords: Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI), earthquake damage estimation, heatmap, oshnavieh city.



 

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