Spatial Data Infrastructure
The Central America Probabilistic Risk Assessment (CAPRA) program is an ongoing World Bank initiative to enhance the understanding of disaster risk throughout Central America. It encompasses probabilistic risk assessment analysis of hurricane, earthquake, volcano, flood, tsunami and landslide hazards. The platform’s architecture has been developed by regional experts to be modular, extensible and open, allowing it to be expanded and improved. The goal is a ‘living instrument’ where experience is accumulated rather than lost, harnessing the collective work of contributors while minimizing the duplication of their work.
To meet these requirements, the World Bank concluded that a more participatory facility for building regional SDI information was required. Specifically, the World Bank judged that existing SDI platforms:
- Provided no benefit to user registration
- Had few real users
- Provided no recognition to data contributors
- Offered no reward for the effort
- Used ‘stick’, not ‘carrot’ approaches
Disaster Risk Management
Government, institution, NGO and community actors rely on and simultaneously create SDI information in the process of multi-hazard risk management. Disaster risk information is a blend of data sources from the national to the local level, with local knowledge updated much faster. National clearinghouses for SDI information have experienced declines in use and content even prior to the widespread use of Google Earth and similar geo-applications. Geo-applications, mapping products and location based services have grown into quasi-SDI’s themselves due to their benefits for data authors, speed, ease of use and other factors. However, despite their merits, these geo-applications lack critical functionality required for risk assessment. Thus the World Bank partnered with OpenGeo in the GeoNode initiative with the objective to revitalize the SDI domain through the integration of Web 2.0 principles including search, links, authoring, tagging, etc. as well as open source software. These features allow for mapping and monitoring risk, and provide a platform for community and professional involvement in risk awareness and cost-effective mitigation – strategies core to other global risk assessment initiatives.