2017 Volume 11 Issue 2 Pages 145-155
In order to mitigate natural disasters, it is important that an individual can access infor- mation about various hazards causing natural disasters or hazard maps issued by local governments, various warnings announced by Japan Meteorological Agency and evacuation related information announced by local governments, and emergency evacuation areas designated by local governments. This is especially important for non-structural measures to be effective and influences the individ- ual’s ability to decide whether his/her location is safe or not, and evacuate to safer locations if the current location is unsafe. In this article, we evaluate usefulness of those information provided for non-structural measures by applying the concept of “information quality” and consider possibilities and problems of applications for disaster mitigation. We also introduce a prototype web applica- tion named “hazard checker” which shows users hazard information, meteorological information and nearby designated emergency evacuation areas based on the users’ current location. The feature is available at any location in Japan.
