IASPEI - Picture Gallery

IUGG XXIV General Assembly July 2-13, 2007 Perugia, Italy
(S) - IASPEI - International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's
Interior
JSS002 Poster presentation 1796
Walking Tours by Use of Tsunami Digital Library (TDL)
Dr. Sayaka Imai
Department of Computer Science Gunma University
Yoshinari Kanamori, Nobuo Shuto
We are developing a Tsunami Digital Library (TDL) which can store and manage documents about
tsunami, news paper articles, tsunami run-up simulations, field work data, videos, etc., in Japan. Every
person interested in data about the tsunami can get the information through the internet. We also offer
a multilingual interface. Currently some documents and explanations of tsunami videos have been
translated into English and French. TDL is here (http://tsunami.dbms.cs.gunma-u.ac.jp/). We have
proposed a public education on the tsunami disaster which utilizes TDL for citizens in coast areas struck
by the tsunami. We can visualize the change of tsunami disasters by clicking coast areas on the map in
TDL. This shows a kind of virtual walking tours in TDL, and also is an effective public education. We can
plan some walking tours in TDL based on spatio-temporal domain, the region or the era in Japan. For
example, if you have any interest in the 1896 Meiji Sanriku Great Tsunami, you can travel Sanriku
prefectures on the map, and see a lot of records on the tsunami by clicking villages, towns or cities
along coasts in those prefectures. On the other hand, if you want to know the tsunami disasters of all
eras on a town, you have to input the town name as key word, and can obtain the records on all eras
related with the town. Furthermore, TDL will also contribute to a public education for tourists who go
very occasionally sightseeing in the areas struck by the tsunami. This means TDL supports an actual
walking tour. We have developed the necessary TDL environments to support such walking tours as
follows: (1) Keyword retrievals TDL uses XML technology. The documents containing figures, pictures
and tables are represented in XML structure, and managed under an XML database system (Oracle
10g). The schemas of these documents depend on the type of the documents, reports or newspapers.
Therefore, each document has a different schema. In order to make a traversal retrieval crossing whole
documents, it is necessary to use a unified schema which integrates all schemas for XML documents.
We have designed an integration schema by XML, and implemented the system to retrieve some
requested data from TDL through keyword input on Web. (2) Retrievals by mobile phones When tourists
visit the coast area struck by the tsunami, a lot of facts of the tsunami disasters are automatically
retrieved from TDL and displayed on mobile phones to attract their attention. Therefore, it is necessary
to retrieve the region name of the place where tourists are in. We have obtained the place information
from the area code when we use the i-mode of NTT Docomo mobile phones. There are restrictions of
the number of display characters and the computing powers in mobile phones. Then, we have to submit
some remarkable contents, concerning the number of bodies, destroyed houses and ships, and a
summary of the document to mobile phones. TDL for mobile phones is here
(http://tsunami.dbms.cs.gunma-u.ac.jp/iTDL/)
Keywords: tsunami digital library, mobile phone, xml database