Real time integrating of field data into a GIS platform for the management of hydrological emergencies

A wide series of events require immediate availability for decision-makers of information and data from the field. Consider, for example, the necessity of quickly transferring to an Emergency Operations Center the information acquired from monitoring and alerting sensors or, after a disastrous event, the data of the reconnaissance of damage. To this purpose, an integrated GIS and Web-GIS approach has been developed to dynamically create and populate via Web a database with spatial features. In particular, this work concerns the gathering and transmission of spatial data and related information to the desktop GIS so that they can be displayed and analyzed in real time to characterize the operational scenario and to decide the rescue interventions. As basic software, only free and open source have been used: QuantumGIS and Grass as Desktop GIS, Map Server with PMapper application for the Web-GIS functionality and PostGreSQL/PostGIS as Data Base Management System (DBMS). The approach has been designed, developed and successfully tested in the management of GIS based navigation of an autonomous robot, both to map its trajectories and to assign optimal paths . This work presents the application to a simulated hydrological event that could interest the province of Catania, in Sicily. In particular, assuming that more teams draw up an inventory of the damage, we highlight the benefits of real-time transmission of the information collected from the field to headquarters.