Open Source GIS for Civil Protection Response in Cases of Wildland Fires or Flood Events

The article describes the capabilities of the open source GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and other Free and Open Source Softwares (FOSS) for building desktop application that can support firefighting and volunteer groups in cases of wildland fires or flood events reactions. The desktop application have two main modules as design. The first module is based on open source GIS software. The second is the server software, database and visualization environment for the application. The main goal of the tool is to visualize administrative and vulnerable objects and POI’s (Points of Interests) like logistic centres for water supplies, tools and supplies from where the firefighting and volunteer groups can take what they need on the field work. The idea is to be visualized detailed information about logistic centres and what kind of equipment is stored inside. This is needed, because there aren’t implemented modern ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) tools in the field work. The current situation is such that the groups are using instructions written on paper in most of the cases. Our article presents a desktop application that can be used on the field and in an operational rooms by firefighting and volunteer groups acting in cases of wildland fires or flood events. In our application different open source software solutions as Geoserver, Qgis, Web App Builder, Boundless WEBSDK, PostgreSQL and OpenLayers are used:

Geoserver allows the user to display spatial information to the world;

QGIS is a professional GIS (Geographic Information System) cross-platform application that is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS);

Web App Builder is a plugin for QGIS that allows easy creation of web applications;

Boundless WEBSDK which provides tools for easy-to-build JavaScript-based web mapping applications;

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system;

OpenLayers is an open-source JavaScript library for displaying map data in web browsers.