Towards an Information System for Early Warning of Landslides

Abstract

More than four million people lost their lives in disastrous geological events such as earth quakes, tsunamis and strong rainfall combined with landslides during the last century. Obviously there is a strong demand for analyzing such events and for developing early warning systems to save lives and properties. The European GIS community is invoked to provide its knowledge for the development of new information systems for early warning of geological events. However, at present the analysis and information preparation are still particularly critical points of the early warning chain. Furthermore, the responsible decision makers are usually confronted with huge amounts of structured and unstructured data. Thus the question is how they can be provided with a reliable and manageable amount of information to create the warning decision and for taking preventive measures. In this paper the objectives and requirements of the joint project “Development of suitable information systems for early warning systems” are presented, examining methods of an information system for the early recognition of geological hazards in a mass movement scenario. In the project the simulation of landslides is executed on the basis of geotechnical, mechanically founded models. Thus a better understanding of the geological processes can be achieved. Furthermore, the improvement of the information analysis and preparation are investigated. Therefore techniques such as GIS, numerical simulations, spatial data mining, geo-databases and linguistic methods are combined with each other.