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Disaster Risk Reduction Knowledge Service: A Paradigm Shift from Disaster Data Towards Knowledge Services

DOI:10.1007/s00024-019-02229-w
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Juanle Wang at Chinese Academy of Sciences
Juanle Wang
Kun Bu
Kun Bu
Kun Bu
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Fei Yang at Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Fei Yang
  • Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Yuelei Yuan
Yuelei Yuan
Yuelei Yuan
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Abstract and Figures

Earthquakes have caused tremendous damage in China and around the world; the Wenchuan earthquake that occurred in China 10 years ago is among the deadliest earthquakes in history. The importance of earthquake monitoring and seismic data analysis is now recognized in China. However, the effective dissemination of earthquake-related disaster risk reduction (DRR) knowledge to decision-makers and the public has not been adequately addressed. Under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Knowledge Centre for Engineering Science and Technology (managed by the Chinese Academy of Engineering) launched the Disaster Risk Reduction Knowledge Service in 2016. This service, based on the development of disaster metadata standards, was constructed to share disaster information and provide thematic knowledge services; it facilitates the integration and sharing of disaster data, disaster maps, expert opinions, institutional knowledge, research literature, and videos. A series of earthquake DRR knowledge services applications have been implemented using this knowledge service platform, including (1) a global earthquake daily distribution map service, (2) a spatiotemporal map of historical earthquakes in the One Belt One Road region, (3) a Wenchuan earthquake disaster relief knowledge service, and (4) a thematic knowledge service for disaster relief work and contingency planning during the Jiuzhaigou earthquake. In the long term, this system will support the conversion of disaster data into DRR knowledge and provide services for international organizations, government institutions, research and educational institutions, enterprises, and the general public.
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Disaster Risk Reduction Knowledge Service: A Paradigm Shift from Disaster Data Towards
Knowledge Services
JUANLE WANG,
1,4,6
KUN BU,
2
FEI YANG,
1,4,6
YUELEI YUAN,
1,6
YUJIE WANG,
1,6
XUEHUA HAN,
1,3,6
and
HAISHUO WEI
1,5,6
Abstract—Earthquakes have caused tremendous damage in
China and around the world; the Wenchuan earthquake that
occurred in China 10 years ago is among the deadliest earthquakes
in history. The importance of earthquake monitoring and seismic
data analysis is now recognized in China. However, the effective
dissemination of earthquake-related disaster risk reduction (DRR)
knowledge to decision-makers and the public has not been ade-
quately addressed. Under the auspices of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the
International Knowledge Centre for Engineering Science and
Technology (managed by the Chinese Academy of Engineering)
launched the Disaster Risk Reduction Knowledge Service in 2016.
This service, based on the development of disaster metadata stan-
dards, was constructed to share disaster information and provide
thematic knowledge services; it facilitates the integration and
sharing of disaster data, disaster maps, expert opinions, institutional
knowledge, research literature, and videos. A series of earthquake
DRR knowledge services applications have been implemented
using this knowledge service platform, including (1) a global
earthquake daily distribution map service, (2) a spatiotemporal map
of historical earthquakes in the One Belt One Road region, (3) a
Wenchuan earthquake disaster relief knowledge service, and (4) a
thematic knowledge service for disaster relief work and contin-
gency planning during the Jiuzhaigou earthquake. In the long term,
this system will support the conversion of disaster data into DRR
knowledge and provide services for international organizations,
government institutions, research and educational institutions,
enterprises, and the general public.
Key words: Earthquake disaster, disaster risk reduction, data
sharing, knowledge service.
1. Introduction
The Earth is mankind’s only home, but it is not a
completely stable planet. According to current
statistics, earthquakes of Richter magnitude 8.0, 7.0,
6.0, 5.0, and [2.0 occur 2–3 times, *20 times,
*180 times, *2000 times, and *1,000,000 times
every year around the world, respectively. Due to the
tremendous damage caused by earthquakes, earth-
quake monitoring and data acquisition have become
important priorities for many countries. China, one of
the first countries to begin monitoring earthquakes,
has been recording their occurrence since 2300 BCE
when Zhang Heng invented the seismoscope during
the Han Dynasty. Seismograph stations have been
constructed on a large scale since the founding of the
People’s Republic of China, thus establishing a
multidisciplinary, multicategory seismographic net-
work that covers the entirety of the country. This
seismographic monitoring network includes seismic,
electromagnetic, deformation, and fluid monitoring
networks, as well as a mobile physical field moni-
toring system whose measurement lines have a
cumulative length of 150,000 km (Liu and Peng
2009). To improve the management of seismology
data, the China Earthquake Administration (CEA)
officially launched the China Earthquake Data Center
(CEDC, http://data.earthquake.cn) on 28 September
2016, at the National Earthquake Disaster Mitigation
1
State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental
Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural
Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
100101, China. E-mail: wangjl@igsnrr.ac.cn
2
Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chi-
nese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130102, Jilin, China.
3
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
100049, China.
4
Jiangsu Center for Collaborative Innovation in Geograph-
ical Information Resource Development and Application, Nanjing
210023, China.
5
School of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Shandong
University of Technology, Zibo 255049, China.
6
The International Knowledge Centre for Engineering Sci-
ences and Technology (IKCEST) under the Auspices of UNESCO,
Beijing 100088, China.
Pure Appl. Geophys. 177 (2020) 135–148
Ó2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-019-02229-w Pure and Applied Geophysics
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... The iterative development model is adopted, so the system can be put into use in the system's development life cycle. Through this system, users can gain quick access to various disaster-related knowledge resources and subject-specific knowledge services, including data, maps, literature and videos (Wang et al., 2020a). The overall method of building the sub-platform is to take the standard formulation for disaster-related metadata as the starting point to collect various knowledge resources, including a metadata-based disaster science database, disaster map resources, a disaster expert database, a disaster institution database, a disaster event database, a database of disaster open directory projects, a database of disaster-related information web mining, a disaster literature database, a disaster popular science database, and a disaster video courseware database. ...
An Open Platform for Global Engineering Initiatives: International Knowledge Centre for Engineering Sciences and Technology Under the Auspices of UNESCO
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  • Apr 2022
Open science provides a bright light for global engineering and technology cooperation and promoting global sustainable development. The International Knowledge Centre for Engineering Sciences and Technology (IKCEST), a category II center under the auspices of UNESCO based in Beijing, aims at providing knowledge-based services at a global scale for policy-makers and engineering science and technology professionals in the world, with particular reference to the developing countries. IKCEST has established a platform with data resources and knowledge services at the core, which includes one general platform and several sub-platforms in its prioritized areas such as the disaster risk reduction (DRR), the intelligent city (ICITY), the engineering education (ENGEDU) and the silk road sciences and technology (SRST). Since the platform was put into operation, it has launched 38 knowledge applications (APPs), serving 3.26 million users from 220 countries and regions worldwide, and offered training for more than 18,000 persons from developing countries. In face of the pandemic, IKCEST set up a COVID-19 column which received positive feedback from users across the globe, the introductory video of which was publicized on the UNESCO official website. As a knowledge hub supporting global sustainable development goals (SDGs) and an open platform for global engineering initiatives, IKCEST will spare no efforts to make greater contributions to providing more tailored and valuable knowledge-based services for global users.
... Scholars have variously argued for the diversification of hazard adaptation preparedness measures to include risk prevention measures [6,7]. They contend that hazard risk reduction planning improves risk awareness which is necessary for building hazard response capacity in cities. ...
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Climate change-related hazards will aggravate and impact differently on urban societies. Although early warning systems will be important for reducing the hazard risks in cities, the nature of early warning systems that are available to residents of informal settlements remains less understood. This paper aimed to assess the early warning systems through which informal dwellers reduce their hazard risks in an African city. Using Accra as the case, data were collected from 582 households using a structured questionnaire along with 25 institutional key informant interviews and 14 focus discussions with state and settlement actors in this study. Findings of the paper show that a mix of formal and informal early warning systems are utilized by residents of informal settlements , but the majority of them perceived state disaster management institutions as not performing optimally in their resident settlements. The nature of land ownership in the informal settlements influenced their political exclusion and state institutions' decisions not to locate weather monitoring equipment in their settlements. Respondents without the security of land tenure perceived state disaster management institutions as not performing optimally, which negatively affects their capacity to respond to climate change-related hazards. The paper thus recommends the incorporation of informal early warning systems into city-wide hazard early warning systems through participatory planning in Accra and similar contexts. Future scholars may extend this discourse by examining the effect of the use of informal early warning systems on the uptake of formal hazard early warning sources in informal settlements.
... accessed on 1 March 2022), which was launched in 2016 by UNESCO with a disaster prevention and reduction mission and relies on the International Engineering Science and Technology Knowledge Center (IKCEST) of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a UNESCO Category II Center. It is a knowledge service designed to provide resources for disaster data to facilitate knowledge discovery [27,28]. The DRR scholar module of the DRRKS contains various English-language studies related to natural hazards, which are derived from the Web of Science (WOS) database, the world's largest comprehensive academic platform. ...
Global Flood Disaster Research Graph Analysis Based on Literature Mining
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Floods are the most frequent and highest-impact among the natural disasters caused by global climate change. A large number of flood disaster knowledge were buried in the scientific literature. This study mines research trends and hotspots on flood disasters and identifies their quantitative and spatial distribution features using natural language process technology. The abstracts of 14,076 studies related to flood disasters from 1990 to 2020 were used for text mining. The study used logistic regression to classify themes, adopted the dictionary matching method to analyze flood disaster subcategories, analyzed the spatial distribution characteristics of research institutions, and used Stanford named entity recognition to identify hot research areas. Finally, the disaster information was integrated and visualized as a knowledge graph. The main findings are as follows. (1) The research hotspots are concentrated on flood disaster risks and prediction. Rainfall, coastal floods, and flash floods are the most-studied flood disaster sub-categories. (2) There are some connections and differences between the physical occurrence and research frequency of flood disasters. Occurrence frequency and research frequency of flood disasters are correlated. However, the spatial distribution at the global and intercontinental scales is geographically imbalanced. (3) The study’s flood disaster knowledge graph contains 39,679 nodes and 64,908 edges, reflecting the literature distribution and field information on the research themes. Future research will extract more disaster information from the full texts of the studies to enrich the flood disaster knowledge graph and obtain more knowledge on flood disaster risk and reduction.
... The tremendous disaster caused by the Wenchuan earthquake reminds people of the importance of seismic disaster risk reduction. Wang et al. (2019) discussed the effective dissemination of earthquakerelated disaster risk reduction (DRR) knowledge to decision-makers and the public, and introduced the Disaster Risk Reduction Knowledge Service launched in 2016 by the International Knowledge Centre for Engineering Science and Technology (managed by the Chinese Academy of Engineering under the auspices of the UNESCO). In the Service the information related to the Wenchuan earthquake played an important role. ...
Continental Earthquakes: Physics, Simulation, and Data Science—Introduction
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During May 12–14, 2018, the International Conference for the Decade Memory of the Wenchuan Earthquake, in connection to the 4th International Conference on Continental Earthquakes (4th ICCE) and the 12th General Assembly of the Asian Seismological Commission (ASC), was held in Chengdu, China. There have been several outcomes of the Conference (for example, the book published jointly by Higher Education Press and Springer) as well as the present special issue. Among the 58 submissions, 34 have been accepted after peer review. Some of the papers came from the presentations during the Conference, but with additional submissions, the scope of this special issue is far beyond that of the proceedings of the meeting.
Big Data-Driven Disaster Management: A Key Approach for Smart Humanitarian Activity
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Knowledge management practices in disaster management: Systematic review
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Examples of knowledge management (KM) practices are common in a disaster context. However, disaster management is a system with many components, and it is not clear how KM practices can be applied in all major phases of disaster management cycle. In this context, this research will answer the following questions: i) What are some of the KM practices used in disaster management? and ii) What are some of the implications of KM practices on disaster management performance? Moreover, the key findings of this study acknowledge the recognition of research gaps that need to be addressed and they can provide future researchers with a research agenda. This article provides a systematic review of the 72 selected papers from SCOPUS databases on KM in the context of disaster management to evaluate the state of the art, finding existing gaps and establishing a direction for further studies. This review explores the use of KM in all phases of disaster management to confirm the advantages of knowledge management in reducing disaster impacts and enhancing disaster resilience.
Design Knowledge Services via Internet-An Analysis on the Functions of China Knowledge Center for Engineering Sciences and Technology(CKCEST)
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