The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B4. Beijing 2008 
fusion of data but also ingestion of that data into process models 
that can prescribe actions to mitigate the effects of the evolving 
emergency such as simulating spatial flooding conditions for a 
given flood magnitude for better preparedness of evacuation 
and relief operations. Decision support tools can help incident 
managers to visualize the event over time, track the activities of 
responders, and predict the outcomes of various courses of 
actions. These tools consist of appropriate models and domain 
knowledge and capable of accessing and analysing the dynamic 
and static databases and provide information and options to the 
emergency manager for taking appropriate decisions. It also 
generate useful and actionable products such as maps showing 
area affected, images showing damages, simulated situations 
likely to follow etc. A few selected decision support tools 
developed have been described below. The conceptual plan of 
database organisation and service is shown in the figure -2 
inundation map, Regional inundation map, Relief support map, 
Breach location map and flood frequency map can be created 
with necessary inputs required in the FMIS data products 
module. A report generation tool is also incorporated in the 
application in the Report tool module, which can create a report 
in html format based on the input (text, image, tabular Queries). 
Various data products created shall be displayed in a layout 
window, where the user can see the output before going to 
generate a Map in PDF or JPG formats. FMIS includes 
generation of its products and services which can be further 
disseminated through various ways. The FMIS provides its 
outputs in standards PDF, JPG, HTML etc. which can be 
disseminated through simple media or through internet platform. 
In the Customization of FMIS the desktop base GIS architecture 
has been adopted. The graphical representation of FMIS system 
architecture has been shown in the figure-3. 
service 
4. SELECTED APPLICATIONS 
4.1 Flood Management Information System 
Bihar State in northern part of India is one of the most chronic 
flood affected states. With an objective to improve flood 
management, Government of Bihar constituted a Flood 
Management Information System Cell (FMISC) approached 
National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA), Department, of 
Space, for developing an information system that can aid in 
flood management activities. Accordingly NRSA has developed 
an operational Flood Management Information System (FIMS) 
using the available database as per the users requirement. The 
objectives of developing FMIS are to organize, secured access 
of data, view, query, analyze and generate outputs. It consists of 
user friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) to visualize the 
Geo spatial database and generate specific flood data products 
with minimum technical expertise at user end. This application 
is developed using Arc Objects 9.1 in Visual Basic 6.0, which 
runs on Windows operating system. The FMIS is designed to 
have desktop architecture consists of various functionalities 
segregated into major modules include, Data Visualization, 
Update data, FMIS Data Products and Report Tool. The data 
visualization module is to load and access various data sets 
available with the application in the form of Metadata. This 
Metadata information is managed by an authorized 
administrator to add, delete or update, which are provided in the 
Update module. Standard data products such as Overview 
The system architecture of FMIS contains there major 
components i.e. Database organization and management, 
Application process and FMIS end user services. In the 
database server level the ESRI Geodatabase has been adopted 
as per user requirements. The Microsoft MS Access 2003 is 
taken as database management system (DBMS) where the 
spatial data is organized as ESRI personal Geodatabase. The 
non- spatial data along with metadata is also stored and 
organized in MS Access table format only. The FMIS system 
layout is based on desktop base architecture. It runs on 
standalone environment where the application needs to be 
installed in individual machine with complete copy of the 
database. After successful installation it will create a desktop 
shortcut and also a link menu in the Programs menu of windows 
operating system. The functional flow of the software is 
described in Figure 4 and GUI and product generation views are 
shown in 5 (a, b &c) 
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