Published works

Consistent and reliable exposure information is crucial for disaster mitigation and evidence-based decision-making for bushfire and other natural hazard risk. There are a few capabilities in Australia to provide nationally consistent exposure information, such as Geoscience Australia’s National Exposure Information System (NEXIS), but they are not comprehensive enough to address the entire spectrum of disaster risk reduction. The existing capabilities were developed to provide information for their known clients and users. To manage disasters efficiently, there is the need for a nationally consistent framework that deals with the collection, collation and dissemination of exposure information for researchers and decision-makers.

The aim of this research project is to develop a framework that could provide a reliability assessment for exposure information that is available to various types of users. This assessment framework will play an important role in the disbursement of data and knowledge through a website and web portal because generally, the users take the information as it stands and assume the information will be appropriate for their usage.

In particular, the data and knowledge disbursed are intended to moderate the socio-economic impact from natural hazards and lifeline utility failures. In doing so, improved risk assessment tools underpin planning, preparedness, response and recovery in disaster management that enable well-informed decisionmaking. Exposure information systems obtain data from many sources with varying resolutions, quality, standards, aggregations, dis-aggregations, statistical approximations and estimations. The reliability assessment framework will help the users, providers and managers of the exposure data and information to communicate the variation in reliability or quality, and ensure they are used appropriately to assess the risk. 

Building on the International Standards Organisation’s criteria for data quality as well as a standardised data provenance framework, we propose a data reliability framework for exposure information systems. One of the features suggested for this framework is for exposure information systems to start with classification systems for various reliability or quality criteria based on the provenance, spatial accuracy, currency and precision of the data. The framework then sets different thresholds of these quality criteria for different types of users. However, this is only an initial threshold within the system. It is recommended that in order for the framework to work, it needs to be open to user input to re-evaluate the standard being put in place. This is owing to the huge variation of users and hence their requirements in terms of data quality. Therefore, it is important to recalibrate the data element criteria, the assessment threshold and the grouping of the type of users based on their inputs.