The importance of spatial-temporal issues for case-based reasoning in disaster management

A disaster brings huge damages to both infrastructure and human beings. The rapid and efficient disaster management is critical for reducing the negative effects by the disasters. A widely accepted approach to assist disaster management is to find and learn the experiences from the similar cases in history. Thus, to record the whole procedure of each disaster, a digital disaster case structure is offered in this paper. The importance of spatial and temporal information for a digital disaster case is focused through the experiences of disaster management. Then a simplified case based reasoning method with the considering of spatial-temporal information is proposed. Comparing with the traditional cased based reasoning methods, it is simple to use and can handle the attributes with basic geospatial dimensions. The proposed method can be integrated to the widely constructed emergency platform as a part of functions of the disaster case repository for assisting the disaster management.