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2 LITERATURE REVIEW
In disaster management, first responders with very
different roles and backgrounds participate and the
heterogeneous information received in real time must
be shown in an understandable way for better deci-
sion making. There are many use cases where Geo-
graphical Information Systems (GIS) technology can
be of great help in multiple ways (Abdalla, 2016):
Earthquakes and humanitarian coordination (the use
of cutting edge GIS calculations to take care of an
outline issue), wild fire (can be useful in identifying
high-hazard regions within given vicinity and restrict
the fire spread and thus minimize the impact), dust
storms (to give the accompanying capacities in man-
aging dust storms disaster management), health haz-
ards (is capable in extreme heat attacks, by providing
the degree and application for spatially analyzing the
distribution of services and its relation to the popu-
lation at risk), terrorism (capacity of using progress-
ing 3D GIS for the headway and execution of GIS-
based intelligent emergency response systems). Spa-
tial analysis provides effective tools for managing risk
and solving the mapping and assessment of hazards.
It is also interesting in that it provides visual models
that help decision-makers make the best use of these
advancements.
The study of natural dangers and disasters in three
dimensions has grown significantly during the past
few years, because the interest and preference of end
users towards 3D is high. Some authors argue that
3D maps have the potential to improve the disaster
management process (Bandrova et al., 2012), since
three-dimensional maps can resolve many perception
problems and provide more clearly presented infor-
mation. User interviews in that study confirmed that
young people prefer 3D information. A questionnaire
carried out in another study (Zlatanova, 2008), with
71 users directly involved in the emergency response
(firefighters: 27, police: 11, and municipality: 33)
concluded that 3D visualization was considered im-
portant by 62% of the users. This was found as a
rather high result considering that half of the users
were not familiar with (GIS).
Some works, nevertheless, stress that most of the
conventional disaster management systems lack the
support for multiple new data sources and that real-
time big data processing tools that can assist decision
makers with quick and accurate results (Shah et al.,
2019).
In this sense, geo-spatial data or data with location
component is considered as the most essential input
element in latest technologies. The geo-spatial data-
sets need to be analyzed to gain information about
disaster locations as it occurs, identify the area and
people that require urgent assistance and locate ap-
propriate areas for shelters to name the least. With
the advent location-based sensors and smartphones
equipped with GPS, a huge volume of geo-spatial data
is generated. Spatial temporal data visualization re-
quires powerful tools that support analysis of geo-
spatial data over time through interactive visualiza-
tion.
Enabling 3D navigation for rescuers in unknown
indoor and outdoor environments, thanks to accu-
rate 3D positioning, simplifies the logistics of emer-
gency operations (Zlatanova et al., 2004), (Kolawole
and Hunukumbure, 2022). Some works have focused
on the use of images from Unmanned Aerial Vehi-
cles (UAVs) for 3D modelling. 3D reconstruction
of the scene has been proved as a crucial aspect for
an efficient management of search and rescue efforts
(Verykokou et al., 2018), (Mysiris et al., 2018). Ex-
ploiting different heterogeneous sources such as ge-
olocated security cameras and their field of view has
also been a topic for other research works (Hong et al.,
2019). Therefore, supporting 3D maps representa-
tions in the Command and Control Centre, with real-
time location information visualisation and analysis
are very relevant.
However, it is difficult to exchange and incorpo-
rate 3D data sets, and make them work seamlessly
with 2D spatial data resources. Therefore, the defi-
nition and use of standards is important. There are
many different designers and creators of 3D standards
and models. A large number of models are vendor-
based, although many others are developed by inter-
national standardization organizations and come from
the CAD/BIM, GIS, or Web domains. For instance,
the Web Map Service (WMS) is a specification de-
veloped by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC),
that has also become an ISO standard (Jagusiak and
Pokorski, 2022), for serving georeferenced map im-
ages over the Internet. These images are typically
produced by a map server from data provided by a
GIS database. At the same time, 3D Tiles is another
OGC open standard for massive heterogeneous 3D
geospatial datasets such as point clouds, buildings,
photogrammetry, and vector data.
Some well-known software solutions imple-
ment these and other standards. For instance,
Geoserver (Iacovella, 2017), an open source map
server for sharing geospatial data used in some
emergency management applications (such as (Li
et al., 2015)), implements WMS, Web Feature Ser-
vice (WFS) Web Coverage Service (WCS), and
additional protocols like Web Processing Service
(WPS) through available extensions. CesiumJS
3D Geospatial Data Management Architecture for Common Operational Picture Functionalities in Emergency Response
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