This paper introduces and discusses issues related to research, development and application of information and communication systems (ICS) to the effectiveness ofhumanitarian reliefefforts. The conference panel not only addresses these issues, but also presents results from an NSF-sponsored, multidisciplinary workshop held in Nairobi, Kenya in June 2006 on this topic.
Natural hazards, such as earthquakes and floods, result in disasters for several reasons. One of the important factors is reducing risk before an incident arises. Such efforts are commonly termed disaster risk reduction (DRR
Introducing PPGIS tools into community-based DRR is not a neutral effort. The information and communication technologies (ICT) embedded in GIS can both aid the DRR efforts as well as impact the community in unintended ways. ICTs may be common in communities engaged in DRR efforts so the introduction of PPGIS may have minimal impact. What are the societal ramifications, however, of PPGIS methods in DRR efforts when ICTs are a relatively new aspect of a given community? What are the communication methods pertinent to PPGIS in the DRR context? How does the ICT literature address PPGIS methods? The paper addresses these and other influences of ICT on societies prone to natural hazards.Keywords: PPGIS, natural hazards, disaster risk reduction, information organization Acknowledgement: Generous thanks to the anonymous review and helpful feedback from the ICT&S Doctoral Students" Meeting colleagues.he numbers of people impacted by natural hazards is showing an upward trend. More people are displaced and put into health risk from floods, earthquakes, and drought. Humanitarian actors seek to reduce these risks through development strategies and community-based exercises to assess disaster risk. A key input to these exercises is accurate and extensive information from which communities might make decisions, changes, and plans for moving forward.
The marginalization of people through classification schemes results in inadequate access to information about these people when the context is, for example, a bibliographic classification system. When the context is the classification of the people themselves, they themselves are underrepresented, for instance, by society and government support. Taking the case of the natural disaster survivor, this paper explores appropriate steps to devising an accurate classification scheme of the survivors.A central tenet...is that at least some of the difficulties faced by persons with disabilities are not the result of functional impairments related to the disability, but rather are the result of a castification process embedded in societal institutions for rehabilitation and education and enforced by well meaning professionals. (Szymanski and Trueba, 1994, 12). Kemp, R. B. (2007). Classifying marginalized people, focusing on natural disaster survivors.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.