Disaster scenario and record capture system

Typical reports on past disasters contain valuable lessons that can help us improve our preparedness and response strategies and operations, especially with the help of modern analysis, simulation and visualization tools. However, disaster historical records are typically written in natural language and for human consumption. They often contain inconsistent data and information, which take time and effort to uncover. Worse yet, further analysis based on report information is almost impossible. DiSRC (Disaster Scenario and Record Capture) system is being designed as a solution of these problems. The system contains a cloud-based authoring system together with software tools running on mobile devices for capturing observational data records in a machine-readable form. The quality of the captured records is controlled and assured by both the capturing tools in real-time and by tools in the cloud. The authoring system can assist authors to write reports based on the captured data and tools for processing the data such as searching, analyzing, etc.