DEVELOPMENT AND DISSEMINATION OF AN ISRAELI FIRST RESPONDERS ADDRESSES GEOSPATIAL DATASET FOR MANAGEMENT OF EMERGENCY EVENTS

Abstract. At the last decades the awareness of the role of developing and improving the technological means in order to support better response during disasters such as earthquake and huge forest fire, became critical. Hence, the first responders agencies (Firefighters, police, Red Cross, municipality etc.) requires a geospatial dataset to manage, operate, coordinate and make their decisions based on a "common language" in order to navigate in real time, and to cooperate "on the field" in an appropriate way for saving life’s.

Due to the event of huge forest fire in the Carmel Forest at the northern area in the state of Israel, the Survey of Israel promoted the development and dissemination of National First Responders Geospatial Dataset (NFRGD) to all of the first responder’s agencies and municipalities.

In the State of Israel, there are more than 1.9 million buildings and 160,000 km of roads and unpaved roads, but only about 30% have an unequivocal name or official number. Since all emergency forces use navigation applications to locate, plan the route and arrive to the event area, most of the buildings and roads cannot be located by means of navigation, because there is no unique identification for them. In these cases, the forces will base their way to the event on prior acquaintance with the area of activity. This knowledge exists only in the local emergency and rescue forces. In huge events, when forces are being enlisted from other service areas to help, and they are not familiar with the local geography, they must work and communicate based on common spatial database.

The main challenges of the NFRGD development were:

1. Designing a product that will be generic to the whole of the First Responders agencies.
2. Dissemination of the dataset in frequency that enable the First Responders agencies IT to integrate the data set in their systems.
3. Overcome complex use cases due to the complexity of the reality representation in National Topographic Data Base.

This article will describe the methodology of the geo computation and algorithms, which implemented in the development of the NFRGD. The algorithms were characterized and developed by a joint team of representatives from the first responders, the chief scientist and systems analysts of the Survey of Israel (SOI).