Geo-communication for risk assessment and catastrophe prevention of flood events in the coastal areas of Chennai

Risk assessment of environmental stressors in the context of information and communication technologies is an emerging field of scientific research, for example to gain an understanding of how floods will develop. Geo-information technologies are accepted as powerful tools in crisis situations. To be successful in risk assessment and catastrophe prevention, it is essential to follow an interdisciplinary approach combining natural scientific, socio-economic and technical knowledge. At the same time it is important to combine top down (planning, official institutions) with bottom up views of the affected people. Interconnecting computational resources, human interdisciplinary expertise and local knowledge, following a top down / bottom up approach, can yield significant benefit in catastrophe prevention. Once the scientific understanding has been gained, a second phase is necessary in which geo-visualisation is important: The message has to be communicated effectively. This article explains how geo-communication and geo-visualisation can foster successful catastrophe prevention to arbitrate between different stakeholders supporting decision making processes. With these policy goals in mind the research results of this study were merged in an ogc-conform, server-based geo-communication portal using several flash based visualisation techniques. Thereby, the use of web-based mapping systems and an interactive participatory mapping tool proved to be an effective technique for risk evaluation.