Building a GIS-Based Information System with Seamless Interaction Between Operations and Disaster Management – New Challenges of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka in Using Spatial Information newline for Regional Disaster Resilient Societies

The Great East Japan Earthquake occurred on March 11, 2011. Tohoku region, off the coast of the Pacific Ocean, was severely damaged by the tsunami, and all of Japan was affected. Recently, torrential and guerrilla rains have been frequently occurring in Uji, Kyoto, which suffered massive damage on August 13, 2013. Soma, Fukushima, and Uji made tremendous efforts for supporting victims’ recovery by using spatial information and GIS. These successful efforts indicate that they had been using spatial information efficiently in their daily operations.

This paper describes the learnings from the past efforts in disaster affected areas and discusses how these areas had been using spatial information for efficient daily operations. The paper makes suggestions to build a GIS-based information system with seamless interaction between daily operations and disaster management, and introduces new challenges faced by Kitakyushu, Fukuoka using spatial information based on cloud computing network for regional disaster resilient societies.