Decision Support for Tsunami Early Warning in Indonesia: The Role of OGC Standards

Abstract

The December 2004 tsunami demonstrated the need for an effective tsunami early warning system for the Indian Ocean. Within the framework of UNESCO-IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) and its Intergovernmental Coordinating Group (ICG), various efforts on national and bilateral basis are coordinated and combined to ensure a fast and reliable tsunami warning for the whole Indian Ocean and its 27 rim countries. The work presented here is embedded in the German–Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS ) project. GITEWS is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to develop a Tsunami Early Warning System for the Indian Ocean in close cooperation with Indonesia and is a major contribution to the Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (InaTEWS) which has been inaugurated by the President of the Republic of Indonesia on November 11, 2008. The system integrates terrestrial observation networks of seismology and geodesy with marine measuring sensors, satellite technologies and pre-calculated simulation scenarios. The GITEWS sensor systems integrate the respective sensor information and process it to aggregated sensor observations in real time. The processed information from all these sensor systems is transmitted to the GITEWS Decision Support System (DSS ) for further processing, analysis and decision support. This chapter describes the application of standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC ) within the GITEWS context for integrating external sensor observation data as well as within the DSS for access to huge geodata, risk and vulnerability and sensor databases using an internal SDI. Especially the OGC Sensor Web Enablement SWE framework (Botts et al. 2006) plays a major role in sensor data management. For map display and communication with the GITEWS simulation system OGC standards are applied, too. For warning message dissemination, the Common Alerting Protocol CAP standard (OASIS 2005) is used to provide targeted regionalized messages to numerous recipients.