RAPID: Investigating the Efficacy of Coordination of Damage Assessment Initiatives following the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake

Imagecat, Inc., Long Beach CA

Investigators

Abstract

The April 2015 Nepal earthquake has resulted in a large number of local, national and international damage data collection efforts. Many organizations involved have a long history of responding to natural disasters and do so with a mandate from the national government or other recognized organization. There are other efforts that have emerged for the Nepal event that are not as coordinated, resulting in confusion to a variety of end-users as to the veracity, technical rigor, or openness of the data. This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project aims to take a view on the damage datasets generated since the earthquake and assess the impact of each dataset in terms of the objectives and eventual end-use. This information will feed the development of data quality benchmarking criteria that can be used by any data collection effort following disaster events. The eventual impact is to reduce the uncertainty in future datasets and support the end-user to better understand the purpose, pedigree and appropriateness of the data for their specific use case. The project will collect data from a number of sources and bring together a database of damage data for Nepal. In-country interviews with data suppliers and end-users will help the understanding of the impact of each dataset. Finally, criteria of best-practice will be generated to help inform users understand and compare data in future events. With evermore increasing technical capabilities for data collection, advancement of data processing, storage and online sharing, it is clear that the demand for open standards and interoperability is increasing. Therefore, it is crucial that data quality measures are clear and accessible to help openly compare data and reduce uncertainty to avoid unintended misuse of damage datasets.