Project APRED: A web-based data analytics platform for supporting community disaster resilience

J Emerg Manag. 2023 Sep-Oct;21(5):399-419. doi: 10.5055/jem.0735.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the Analysis Platform for Risk, Resilience, and Expenditure in Disasters (APRED)-a disaster-analytic platform developed for crisis practitioners and economic developers across the United States (US). APRED provides practitioners with a centralized platform for exploring disaster resilience and vulnerability profiles of all counties across the US. The platform comprises five sections including: (1) Disaster Resilience Index, (2) Business Vulnerability Index, (3) Disaster Declaration History, (4) County Profile, and (5) Storm History sections. We further describe our end-to-end human-centered design and engineering process that involved contextual inquiry, community-based participatory design, and rapid prototyping with the support of US Economic Development Administration representatives and regional economic developers across the US. Findings from our study revealed that distributed cognition, content heuristic, shareability, and human-centered systems are crucial considerations for developing data-intensive visualization platforms for resilience planning. We discuss the implications of these findings and inform future research on developing sociotechnical visualization platforms to support resilience planning.

MeSH terms

  • Community Participation
  • Data Science
  • Disaster Planning*
  • Disasters*
  • Humans
  • Internet