Disaster informatics

[2] It began to emerge as a field after the successful use of a variety of technologies in disasters including the Asian tsunami, September 11th and Hurricane Katrina.

Subsequently, in 2002, a grant proposal was submitted to the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine to begin the formal study of disaster informatics as it related to public health.

[6] Crowdsourcing is a type of data analysis method used in correspondence with creating response mechanisms and mitigation exercises to build situation recovery and preparedness to react to emergencies efficiently and promptly.

Crowdsourcing most corresponds with disaster informatics by advancing improvement in situational awareness and implementing reliability, responsive crisis organizations, and humanitarian collaborations like satellite imagery, early warning systems, and data mining.

Essentially, data mining provides insight into computing innovation in public forums and continuously communicates responsive predictions of disaster recovery.

In the context of individual association with disaster informatics, Geographic Information Systems are used for hazard mapping and damage assessment to help visualize routes to take in infrastructure to the disaster-impacted areas.

[5] Combining this with early warning systems and evaluating population behaviors in natural and man-made crises have helped create alerts to the authorities and the public promptly.

[2] Subsequently, some of the major catastrophic events that took place after the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) initiative were the attacks of September 11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Asian tsunami.

[5] After these attacks occurred this opened up a large volume of communication and coordination between several government agencies to cover different categories of disaster recovery.

During this time, with no early warning systems in place, the tsunami made it difficult for responders to act fast and predict moves for future precaution.

Using disaster informatics, this led to the creation of data regarding oceanic measurement and tectonic wave activity to determine the areas affected by post-tsunami damages.

[3] With the research limitations, Hurricane Katrina exposed many weaknesses within the usefulness of GIS and crowdsourcing, due to the lack of preparation and tools and resources for evacuation.