Exploring The Integration Of GIS And IR And Its Application For The Management Of Emergency Response

Geographical Information System (GIS) is one of the major supporting technologies in thenational platform for the emergency response. The efficient information exchange betweendifferent platforms is an important task in the emergency response management. A large quantityof data originated from documents and web pages can provide a lot of valuable information for theemergency response management. Consequently, the ability of full-text retrieval in GIS for theemergency response management is needed to improve in order to effectively manage theinformation in the documents and web pages rather than the physical files. This research aims toexpand the capacity of full-text retrieval in the traditional GIS applying in the field of theemergency response. The main contents and conclusions of this research include:1.After reviewing and comparing several existing information systems for the emergencyresponse management, this research reckons that to improve the full-text retrieval ability of GIS isan emergent requirement in its application domain of emergency response.2. The foundation of organization and management for attributes in conventional GIS software isRelational Model-based Normal Forms theory. In this theory, values in each attribute field arestrictly considered as Minimum Atom Values. Although it has been proved as a useful approach toaccess most types of attribute values, it still lacks the functions to handle those values comprisedof long text documents. And this situation is revealed by this research as the origination of theweak full-text ability of the traditional GIS software.3. The integration of spatial database engine and full-text retrieval engine is a functional andeffective way to increase the full-text retrieval power in GIS. By implementing this approach, theinformation can be derived flexibly from the combination of different data types, such as mapsand text as well as maps and web pages. Four functions have been implemented in this research: 1)the full-text retrieval for spatial data; 2) searches for documents with spatial location information;3) Geocoding using the information derived from web pages; and 4) analysis for the themes ofdocuments.4. GIS and Information Retrieval (IR) are fused from the bottom of the software development isregarded as a powerful approach to provide several new functions, which are neglected in GIS orIR alone.5. In this research, prototype GIS software with full-text retrieval ability has been designed anddeveloped by using ArcGIS Engine component and Visual Basic programming language. In addition, a database accessing several GBs spatial, documental and web page data has beenestablished as an example data source in this research.6. Numerous data in various types for the Geocoding have been collected in this research. Theadvantages and disadvantages of using those data in Geocoding are summarized and discusseddetailedly. And the author believes it should be useful for the future research in the similar field.