OGC Disasters Resilience Pilot User Guide: Connecting Communities During Disasters for Timely Impact Analysis

Publication Date: 2020-04-27

Approval Date: 2019-11-22

Posted Date: 2019-09-09

Reference number of this document: OGC 19-063

Reference URL for this document: http://www.opengis.net/doc/IP/userguide/19-063

Category: User Guide

Editor: Adam Martin, Kristen Hocutt, Lain Graham, Tosia Shall, Robert Thomas, Terry Idol

Title: OGC Disasters Resilience Pilot User Guide: Connecting Communities During Disasters for Timely Impact Analysis

COPYRIGHT

Important

Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject of patent rights. The Open Geospatial Consortium shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights. Recipients of this document are requested to submit, with their comments, notification of any relevant patent claims or other intellectual property rights of which they may be aware that might be infringed by any implementation of the standard set forth in this document, and to provide supporting documentation.

Note	This document is a user guide created as a deliverable in an OGC Interoperability Initiative as a user guide to the work of that initiative and is not an official position of the OGC membership. There may be additional valid approaches beyond what is described in this user guide.

POINTS OF CONTACT

Name

Organization

Adam Martin

Esri

Ryan Lanclos

Esri

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
- 1.1. Hurricane Preparation One Week Before Disaster
- 1.2. Hurricane-Based Flooding Impact Analysis During the Event
2. Simple Architecture
3. General Use Cases by User Activity
4. Special Topics
- 4.1. The Right Data for the Right People at the Right Time
5. Scenarios and Tools Demonstration
- 5.1. Hurricane Preparation One Week Before Disaster
- 5.2. Hurricane-Based Flooding Impact Analysis During the Event
6. Conclusion and Way Forward

1. Introduction

Emergency managers can use this guide to see how they can use the ArcGIS platform to connect geospatial communities so that they and their stakeholders have the right information before and during a disaster. Specifically, it empowers locally focused emergency managers, planning chiefs and local watch officers with critical weather, address, demographic and health data to help them monitor incidents and estimate the impacts of an upcoming disaster, and then respond to changing conditions to ensure enough recovery resources are requested and deployed in targeted impact areas.

ArcGIS, a core part of the Esri geospatial cloud, provides emergency managers and first responders the critical spatial data infrastructure needed to plan for, respond to, and recover from disasters such as hurricanes and floods, acting with confidence and understanding to save lives and property. With this global geospatial infrastructure in place. locally focused emergency managers, planning chiefs and local watch officers

In three basic steps, managers of emergency operations will learn how to:

quickly federate the needed data services from a variety of sources (Chapter 3)
configure those data services into helpful configurable web and mobile application templates (Chapter 5.1), and
analyze data on the fly for decision making as the situation evolves (Chapter 5.2)

With ArcGIS’s open platform architecture, these managers can leverage the information coming from a variety of sources and formats – including web services using OGC’s open standards - making these data quickly accessible, prioritized and filtered into the critical reporting tools that help decision makers respond effectively.

1.1. Hurricane Preparation One Week Before Disaster

A Texas State EOC Manager who wants to quickly curate & federate web services (Esri REST, OGC) (data like: Weather status, Flood Prediction Zones, Households/Addresses, and other Local Lifelines), to do impact analysis to support resource requests from federal government and to know where to pre-position critical resources like water, food and electrical generators.

1.2. Hurricane-Based Flooding Impact Analysis During the Event

As the flooding continues to increase, a local watch officer is monitoring the real-time flood inundation reports from first responders and the public against the forecasted inundation maps to see where the flooding levels are right now, and whether new incidents and new impacts to vulnerable populations are occuring in his area. After reporting them to his Operations and Planning Section Chiefs, they determine what kinds of new or additional resources might be needed to support their jurisdiction.

2. Simple Architecture

The architecture for this pilot involves two key cataloging applications, ArcGIS Portal and ArcGIS Hub, and three key Clients, ArcGIS Pro (Desktop), ArcGIS Web AppBuilder and ArcGIS Online Web Map Viewer, as shown below in Figure 1.

Figure 1. ArcGIS Simple Architecture

3. General Use Cases by User Activity

This pilot focuses on the role of a State Emergency Operations Center Manager one week prior to projected landfall of a major hurricane. In this scenario, the manager anticipates flooding in certain jurisdictions across the state. The State level Manager will likely become the Incident Commander and coordinate with many other local and state emergency management roles - e.g., planning and operations section chiefs, local incident watch officers - who will need a common operating picture on the evolving disaster and related incidents in local zones.

The authoritative data federated by the Incident Commander serves as the foundation for the common operating picture among his or her stakeholders, including the public.

Below, the Commander can quickly see how to federate this foundational data, most of which may already exist and simply needs to be registered. Other key datasets may need to be published or re-published for operational purposes.

3.1. Registration of data

As a State Emergency Manager, or supporting staff, when you prepare for an upcoming flooding event, you may be sent or find authoritative data about key community lifelines, such as updated health care facility information or new flood forecasts, that will be useful for estimating resources needed or designating a distribution center. These data may come from a variety of stakeholders – local officials, state officials, federal agencies, universities, non-profits like the Red Cross, individual volunteer groups, social media, and private companies.

There are three approaches to registration in ArcGIS. First, a manager can use her organizational ArcGIS Online or Enterprise Portal account to register individual items to a public data group. Second, she can federate existing groups of data curated by other organizations within ArcGIS Online ecosystem. Third, she can use APIs or other tools to sync third party catalog items into ArcGIS online or Enterprise portal groups.

These data or content groups can then be quickly shared into your ArcGIS Hub Site for your stakeholders to explore and discover.

3.1.1. Option One: Adding specific datasets and services (layers, maps, apps)

In the example below, managers will see how to navigate to your Portal homepage and add two separate US Army Corps of Engineers Levee layers to a data group. One layer contains Floodwalls and the other Embankments.

Step 1: Go to your Content tab and begin to Add Item. See Figure below.

Figure 2. Add Data - Step 1

Step 2: Drop down to From the Web. See Figure below.

Figure 3. Add Data - Step 2

Step 3: Insert the URL to the service. Give the layer a title, tags and publish. See Figure below.

Figure 4. Add Data - Step 3

Step 4: On the item detail page, share out the newly added item to the Hub group. These new data will be added to your Flood event Hub site dynamically and stay updated as those publishers modify or add new data to their groups. Repeat steps for each layer, such as the embankments line layer.

Your changes are automatically saved.

To add this item to a Hub Site, simply share the Open Data Group to your selected groups in the Groups Manager of the site. This step is shown below in the Option Two section.

3.1.2. Option Two: Registering Curated ArcGIS Data Groups to your Hub Site

From the Groups Manager tab, a manager can select groups that contain the public data he wans to be accessible through your site. The groups are managed in ArcGIS Online that he or other organizations have made available for Open Data. The items in those groups could be OGC services or any of the many of the supported OGC file types.

You can search groups to add to your site by scrolling through all available open data groups.

Step 1. Within the Hub admin app, navigate to the Groups Manager tab on your site. See Figure below.

Figure 5. Register Groups - Step 1

Step 2. The Groups Manager interface is where he begins to access different data and apps from various groups. See Figure below.

Figure 6. Register Groups - Step 2

Step 3. Before beginning your search uncheck 'Show Your Organization’s Data Only'. See Figure below.

Figure 7. Register Groups - Step 3

Step 4. Simply add data groups already managed by different authoritative organizations in ArcGIS Online - like the state of Texas, Arlington County, US Geological Survey, or NASA’s Disaster Program. These trusted organizations have curated data and applications just for your event or types of events and are easy to add to your specific website. Search for groups, such as 'Harris County', 'HIFLD', 'USGS', 'NASA Disaster'. Once he adds a group, any supported public item from that group will be available on your site. If he does not want an item to be part of Hub, he can simply make the item private. See Figure below.

Figure 8. Register Groups - Step 4

Step 5. For any of your selected groups, one can view the group details and content. See Figures below.

Figure 9. Register Groups - Step 5

Figure 10. Register Groups - Step 5b

3.1.3. Option Three: Automatically Registering Catalogs into ArcGIS Groups

A manager can also instruct development staff to use the ArcGIS REST API, Python API for ArcGIS, or [Geoportal Server](https://github.com/Esri/geoportal-server/wiki/Portal-for-ArcGIS-Integration) to automate the registration of items from third party catalogs or sources. A demonstration of this approach is not part of the scope of this pilot.

For details on how to use the ArcGIS APIs, see https://developers.arcgis.com.

3.2. Publication of data

Data that needs to be published or re-published for the specific scenarios is addressed in Chapter 5.

Types of Data Services

ArcGIS supports many of the OGC services as shown here: http://www.opengeospatial.org/resource/products/compliant

3.3. Discovering of data

For the purposes of this Pilot, an Emergency Management Director, or Incident Commander, would provide stakeholders the ability to discover data in ArcGIS by searching or browsing content in the Hub Site.

Search for Keywords

Step 1. Click Search on the home page to open the search box. See Figure below.

Figure 11. Discover Data - Step 1

Step 2. Type your keyword or words or select Data, Documents or Apps & Maps and click Enter or the magnifier icon in the search box to see a list of results and sources in the lower portion of the page. See Figure below.

Figure 12. Discover Data - Step 2

Step 3. You can narrow by selecting a facet, such as a Data Source. For example, if let’s Department of Urban Housing and Development. See Figure below.

Figure 13. Discover Data - Step 3

Step 4. Select the resulting data you want, for example, Housing Damage by Block Group. See Figure below.

Figure 14. Discover Data - Step 4

Step 5. You can explore the data further by browsing attributes. By selecting ceratin attributes, the smart map preview at the top of the page will change to visualize that attribute. See Figurs below.

Figure 15. Discover Data - Step 5

Figure 16. Discover Data - Step 5b

The example above shows how an manager can enable data discovery with all relevant stakeholders through a Hub Site.

As a State Emergency manager or designated staff, discovering the authoritative data for registration or republication into your Hub site for your particular community or disaster could happen through the

exchange of URLs through existing relationships with the public safety community (HIFLD, DHS CONOPS, FEMA)
searching in existing catalogs such as Geoplatform.gov, Data.gov, ArcGIS Online or the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.

See how to register these data as groups or items in the section above.

3.4. Downloading of data

Data presented in the Hub Site can be downloaded from the dataset page in standard formats (csv, geojson, shp, kml) by clicking the download button underneath the map in the top right corner. See Figure below.

Figure 17. Discover Data - Downloads

3.5. Data Integration

See Chapter 5

3.6. Republication of data

Web services provided by third parties may not be demand-ready for the high spikes in interest by all the emergency manager’s stakeholders, or provided in a format that enables all the kinds of analysis needed. In addition, to enable configurable web apps and web analytics on the fly, RESTFul, JSON based APIs are commonly preferred, per the W3C and OGC’s recommendations for Best Practices for Data on the Web (#24). Therefore, data managers may want to have staff republish 3rd party data in OGC or Esri web service formats, hosted in the demand-scalable ArcGIS Online platform using this following method in ArcGIS Pro.

In this Pilot example, the WFS service from a National Government database is re-published and hosted to ArcGIS Online. As part of the common operational picture, Emergency Operations Managers may want to get levee data from the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) on floodwalls, encroachments and embankments for Houston, TX, currently provided as an OGC Web Feature Service (WFS v2.0). The following guide shows the steps for clipping and re-publishing an area of interest in ArcGIS Pro.

Step 1: From the USACE Levees website (https://levees.sec.usace.army.mil), copy the mapserver URL to paste into the server connection in ArcGIS Pro. See Figure below.

Figure 18. Republish Data - Step 1

Step 2: In ArcGIS Pro, connect to the WFS Service

Open an ArcGIS Pro project, open the Catalog panel and view the “Project” tab.
Right-click on the “Servers” folder and choose “New WFS Server Connection”.
1. If the Servers folder is not shown, choose the “Insert” tab in the ribbon, and then click the “Connections” button and choose “New WFS Server”.
In the Add WFS Server Connection window, enter the service URL in the “Server URL” input box and click the “OK” button. (https://levees.sec.usace.army.mil/mapserver/public/ows) See Figures below.

Figure 19. Republish Data - Step 2

Figure 20. Republish Data - Step 2b

In the Catalog panel, Project tab, a new item called “WFS on… wfs” should now be available in the Serves folder. See Figure below.

Figure 21. Republish Data - Step 2c

Step 3: View the WFS Layers in a Map

In an ArcGIS Pro project, open the Catalog panel or click the Add Data button in the “Map” tab of the ribbon, and then navigate to the Servers folder.
From the Catalog panel, Project tab:
1. To add to your current map, select one or more layers from the WFS service. Drag and drop the layer(s) into the map or Contents panel. Alternatively, right-click a layer or layer group and choose “Add to Current Map”.
2. To create a new map with layers from the WFS service, right-click the layer(s) and choose “Add to New Map”.
From the Add Data window:
1. To add layers to your current map, first open WFS item and then select one or more layers and click the “OK” button. See Figure below.

Figure 22. Republish Data - Step 3

If the layers are not displayed in the correct location, or if features appear to be missing, this is likely due to the default WFS layer settings. In the map contents panel, right-click a WFS layer and go the WFS section. Check on “Swap x/y coordinates” and set the maximum features returned to a higher value. See Figure below.