National Information Systems of Natural Crises in Some Countries

Context: The natural crises national information system (NISNC) has a key role in promoting natural crisis management by analyzing and understanding the situation, managing and allocating the resources, coordinating actions and supporting of decision making and exchanging of information. The purpose of this paper is to examine the NISNC general and technical characteristics and functional capabilities in Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, and Turkey. Evidence Acquisition: This comparative study was conducted using databases like Google Scholar, Science Direct, PubMed and Scopus in the period from 2000 to 2017. The following featured were under the focus: being nationalized and computerized and availability of information. From among the 41 available studies, 24 were examined among which 12 belonged to Germany, 6 to the Netherlands, 3 to Romania and 3 to Turkey. Finally, the information obtained from different countries was compared on the basis of comparative tables. Results: In all countries, the Interior Ministry was in charge of NISNC and NISNC is used in the entire cycle of crisis management (the Netherlands is used only in the reaction phase). This system has a modular design, distributed database, and mirror server. Synchronization allows the data recording in a system gets registered in other systems. NISNC is designed for static and dynamic data collection, with offline access allowed only in the Netherlands. The most common functional capabilities of the NISNC in selected countries were resource management, communication and reporting, status management and geographic information system. Conclusion: NISNC leads to the improvement of cooperation, information exchange and coordination in the management of natural crises through providing methods, terminology, information formats, and standard operating procedures.