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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B7. Istanbul 2004 
include burying deaths immediately and damage assessment to 
speed recovery operations. As response phase includes variety 
of activities and skills, it urgently needs participating, 
cooperating and co-ordinating of a lot of organizations to 
manage it. Also it is necessary to establish a GIS to efficiently 
support such activities in this phase. 
3. DEVELOPING A WEB-BASED GIS TO MANAGE 
FARTHQUAKE RESPONSE PHASE 
Developing a GIS to manage earthquake response phase is 
performing by a research team in K.N.T University of Iran. The 
main object of this team is to develop a GIS for managing 
earthquake response phase to better decision-making during and 
just after the carthquake. In this way, some steps have been 
mentioned. (See figure .1) 
  
  
   
Needs Assessment 
    
  
Data Model 
& 
standardization 
     
  
Building 
Damage 
   
Functions 
Estimation 
  
  
  
  
   
ian — 
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Developing 
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Refinements Software | 
N 
  
  
  
  
  
  
Figure 1. Steps of developing a GIS for earthquake disaster 
management 
3.1 Needs assessment 
Needs assessment is the first step in implementing a successful 
GIS within any government. Needs assessment is a systematic 
look at how departments function and the spatial data is needed 
to do their work .In the case of earthquake disaster management 
the involving organizations were identified .Then needs 
assessment was performed through interviewing potential users 
in these organizations. As a result of needs assessment some 
critical pieces of information have been produced .Then certain 
tasks were identified that can be done more efficiently or 
effectively in a GIS to be utilized by involved organizations 
such as , displaying epicentre, displaying destructed buildings, 
displaying the safe buildings, determination of the nearest 
emergency centres to the affected area, displaying the locations 
for sheltering, estimating the majority of damages or losses 
immediately after earthquake, find the best route to dispatch 
emergency personnel to the affected area, showing the locations 
of interruption in pipelines in order to reduce the probability of 
secondary damages and so forth. According to each application 
identified, certain GIS functions will be required such as, 
query and display, identify and spatial analysis functions 
679 
(routing ,...),advanced analysis(modelling) and programming. 
Each GIS application requires relevant spatial and non-spatial 
data, so a list of required data was provided. 
3.2 Data needed in the GIS database 
A list of required data for earthquake disaster management was 
identified and categorized. These categories include the data 
about buildings (residential or business), roads (freeways, 
highways, streets...), lifeline systems (water pipes, electric 
lines...), open areas to settle the homeless (parks, orchards, 
camping area...), public service stations (gas station...), some 
urban structures (bridges), some natural and urban conditions 
data (population, soil layers, faults). 
3.3 Data model 
In this step, once the required data for response phase of 
earthquake disaster management applications has been 
identified, the data model that identifies the entities and their 
relationship were designed and require standards were 
developed. 
3.4 Modeling 
The results of needs assessment show that, one of the major 
problems of involved organizations in earthquake disaster 
response of Tehran, is lack of any prediction on extend and size 
of damages for the urban features and human losses after the 
earthquake.So having a prediction about damages of earthquake 
provides a lot of benefits for managers before and just after the 
earthquake. Prediction of results before the occurrence of 
earthquake by assumption some earthquake scenarios and 
asking some "what if' type questions makes it possible to 
evaluate alternate solutions for pre-event managing of the 
earthquake which this subject is not concerned here. Estimation 
of the results of an earthquake just after the earthquake helps 
the emergency personnel to rapidly response to the affected 
area. In this respect spatial modeling is the most demanding use 
of a GIS and provides the greatest benefit to predict the results 
expected or estimate the results of an earthquake. Extend of 
damage to the urban structures depends on a lot of parameters 
such as structure resistance against earthquake, the intensity of 
earthquake, distance of urban structures to epicentre, soil type, 
materials used to build the structures and so forth. Since 
destroying of buildings causes the main physical damages and 
losses of human, a Building Damage Estimation Model 
(BDEM ) has been developed to estimate extend and size of the 
damages of buildings, just after the earthquake. The model is 
based on some mathematical equations and needs data input 
such as environmental data, building property data and some 
real earthquake property data which will import to BDEM just 
after the occurrence of earthquake to estimate the situation of 
every building. As a result BDEM divides the situation of the 
buildings after the earthquake into three categories: buildings 
which stay safe (Safe buildings), buildings which are not 
destroy but because of some disastrous crack they should be 
evacuated (Evacuated buildings) and destructed buildings 
(Destructed buildings) (see figure.2).Categorizing buildings and 
displaying results help managers to realize about extend and 
size of the area which is affected by the earthquake and density 
and distribution of the buildings in every category. It also helps 
the managers to know about the situation of their recourses 
(business buildings) then decide about the priorities to dispatch . 
their emergency's personnel from their safe resources to the 
residential affected areas with respect to density of destructed 
o ss