Tracking FEMA

Abstract

The finished product is a website visualizing the efforts of disaster response organizations (such as FEMA). The visualizations are driven by a Javascript based library used to display various aspects of a disaster. The data used in the visualizations is parsed from HTML in Virginia Tech’s Integrated Digital Event Archiving and Library (IDEAL). The project has led to scripts that extract information from IDEAL and then process them into set fields. Those fields (data) then manually have to be converted into the proper (intended) visualization and entered in the CMS. The future hope for this project is that the whole process outlined above can be automated.

Description
The zip archive attached to this project is the compressed TrackingFEMA Git repository. It contains the CMS (RefineryCMS - Rails), processing scripts, as well as visualization sample code. The processing scripts are in a folder called TrackingFEMAProcessing. The visualizations are contained in Visualization. The rest of the rails files are contained within the usual Ruby on Rails file system structure.
Keywords
Information visualization, FEMA, Tracking disaster response, IDEAL
Citation