Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FLOOD-serv (Public FLOOD Emergency and Awareness SERVice)

Teaser

The problem addressed by the FLOOD-serv Project is related to preventing and mitigating the negative consequences of floods. Floods endanger lives and cause human tragedy, as well as heavy economic losses. In addition to economic and social damage, floods can have severe...

Summary

The problem addressed by the FLOOD-serv Project is related to preventing and mitigating the negative consequences of floods. Floods endanger lives and cause human tragedy, as well as heavy economic losses. In addition to economic and social damage, floods can have severe environmental consequences, for example when installations holding large quantities of toxic chemicals are inundated or wetland areas destroyed. Flooding can be caused by flash floods, coastal floods, or river floods, but also by urban flooding that it is caused when the city sewage system and draining canals do not have the capacity to drain the amounts of rainwater. With the prospect of climate change, the frequency and intensity of floods in large parts of Europe is projected to increase.
The overall objective of FLOOD-serv is to provide a pro-active and personalized citizen-centric public service application that will enhance the involvement of the citizen and will harness the collaborative power of ICT networks (networks of people, knowledge and sensors) to raise awareness on flood risks and to enable collective risk mitigation solutions and response actions. FLOOD-serv is developing a series of instruments to support public administrations in managing floods and an overall integrating platform and portal that provides a common interface and entry point to the components and provides information to, as well as allows two way interaction with citizens.

Work performed

Work during the first year of the FLOOD-serv project was focused on identifying the relevant legal-institutional framework, identifying the user needs and requirements, and defining the functional and technical specifications of the FLOOD-serv platform and its Components.
Under Work Package (WP)2, three studies were carried out related to the flood risk management public services in the selected regions. These studies investigated comparatively the European, national and regional relevant legal framework (D2.1), then evaluated the characteristics of flood risk management public services including existing ICT instruments used (D2.2), and finally produced an evaluation of public and stakeholder participation procedures in each pilot city (D2.3).
Under WP3 Development of FLOOD-serv system components, the first year was dedicated mainly to identifying user requirements (D3.1) and performing functional and technical analysis including designing architectures of each components (D3.2). To achieve this, five workshops were organized in each of the pilot city discussing: the city’s situation, problems faced, needs and requirements from FLOOD-serv components and central Platform/Portal. In addition, questionnaires were distributed to and completed by pilot cities, and several discussions by online teleconferencing took place. Based on D3.1, in D3.2, functional and technical requirements were defined for each of the FLOOD-serv components including system architectures.
The first year of WP4 FLOOD-serv collaborative and personalized citizen-centric platform, was concerned with the central FLOOD-serv Platform/Portal and issues related to integration. Same issues (as in WP3) were covered related to identifying user requirements. User requirements were identified under D4.1, functional and technical requirements defined in D4.2 and overall system architecture (including issues related to single sign on and interoperability) in D4.3.

Final results

I. Expected results and progress beyond the state of the art by the end of the project:
Progress beyond the state of the art is expected on each of the components of the Project, at both technical and functional level, through merging field area (flood management) knowledge with ICT capabilities:
1. The Emergency Management Console, is developed under this project incorporating data from the other components and outside the project to produce analyses, decision suggestions and simulations, and monitoring of actions;
2. The Territory Management System will analyse satellite and aerial images to produce automated detection of floods and flood impacts. Novel and intelligent algorithms are being developed for identifying flood related events from images from satellites or drones.
3. The Social Media Component will support authorities in identifying evolution of public opinion on social media, creating opinion graphs and maps and enabling them to formulate appropriate communication strategies and messages.
4. The Citizen Direct Feedback component –allows citizens to transmit messages related to floods to relevant public authorities. The novelty of this solution is that from a technical point of view it matches flood management back office processes, and from an end result point of view it allows a new functionality of involving citizens in direct dialogue with authorities.
5. The Semantic Wiki (SW) component is a knowledge management solution aimed at incorporating and encoding in a human and machine readable format, relevant and actionable knowledge about floods. It will contain knowledge from a low level of abstraction (e.g. metadata about variables used in the project, identification of specific entities such as sensors, etc.), to a high level of abstraction (definitions of floods, types of floods, impacts, etc.). This system will support both human use (by experts involved in the project or by outside public) and machine use (e.g. by defining metadata of data used in the project which can become open data).
6. Finally the FLOOD-serv central Platform and Portal will act as a single gate and single sign-on point of access to all components but also will present citizens with relevant real time data about floods and allowing citizens to interact with authorities.


II. The expected impacts as defined by the Project description are:
1. Stimulating the creation, delivery and use of new services on a variety of devices, utilizing new web technologies, coupled with open public data.
2. More personalized public services that better suit the needs of users;
3. Reducing the administrative burden of citizens and businesses (e.g. collecting information from citizens only once).
4. Increased transparency of and trust in public administrations.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.floodserv-project.eu/.