When generalized Voronoi diagrams meet GeoWeb for emergency management

Abstract

This article is to investigate a Voronoi-based computational model for Geographic Knowledge Discovery (GKD) from Geo-reference Web 2.0 datasets to provide detailed emergency management analysis of various geospatial settings including various distance metrics; weights modeling different speeds, impacts, sizes, capacities of disasters; point,line and areas of influence representing disasters, obstacles blocking interactions such as political boundaries, rivers, and so on; higher order neighbors in case the first k-nearest neighbors are currently busy or not functioning; any combination of these settings. The framework is analyzed for efficiency and accuracy and tested in a variety of emergency life-cycle phases consisting of real datasets extracted from GeoWeb 2.0 technologies.