KeRALA - AN EXPERT SPATIAL-INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR KERALA

Natural phenomena metamorphose as natural disasters only when human society is incognizant. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are inherently capable to enable societies by rapidly sensiblising the public. Community Informatics aspect of ICT is yet to be fully harnessed in application intensive domains such as agriculture, disaster preparedness/ mitigation, etc. For such applications, we need systems that can sense and communicate timely data, and transmute the same, on the fly into actionable information on the uncertain spatial and erratic temporal dimensions of natural phenomenon. It is proposed to build such a system as a web-accessible portal that is supported by computational spatial informatics facility at the backend. Such a portal allows for collection of real-time primary spatio-temporal data from geographically distributed data and information sources with provision for real-time updation. This web-accessible spatial informatics data aggregation and knowledge dissemination portal is called Kerala eResource-repository And Location-specific Advisory (KeRALA). The portal system has two distinct but interrelated parts: KeR (Kerala e-Resource-repository) and LA (Location-specific Advisory) respectively. The authors present a description of the KeRALA portal design and illustrate its applicability for real-time information aggregation and dissemination.