General
RISe is a stand-alone tool which was developed in order to allow an easy conversion of the geo-referenced SELENA input and output files into Google Earth kml-files. Further, RISe facilitates an easier generation of input files for SELENA, the open-source risk and loss computation tool developed by NORSAR.
Figure 1: Illustration of inventory, input and output files.
Basic features
The current version of RISe disposes of three different main features which will be called by the user before, during and after the SELENA risk computation:
- before -> Preparing input (i.e. the preparation of the SELENA input files soilcenteri.txt based on the single geographical units which were demarcated in Google Earth)
- during -> Input Illustrator (i.e. the conversion of geo-referenced SELENA input files into Google Earth files)
- after -> Output Illustrator (i.e. the conversion of geo-referenced SELENA output files into Google Earth files)
Figure 1 illustrates the main menu of RISe with the three main features on the left toolbar. However, before one of these features can be used some preparation works have to be conducted in Google Earth which basically are:
- the demarcation of the entire study area, i.e. a region, city, or city district
- the subdivision of the study area into distinct minimum geographical units (geounits)
- the assignment of the center points of each minimum geographical unit
- the designation/indexing of each center point and each minimum geographical unit.
Illustration types
RISe comprises of different illustration types, i.e. the way the SELENA results are plotted. Since especially damage results are somehow difficult to be plotted on a single color-shaded map (Figure 2), alternative illustration types such as ‘bar chart’ plots (Figure 3, Figure 4) are included which allow the depiction of the damage results for the five different damage states in each geographical unit.
Figure 2: Color-shaded plot to illustrate e.g. soil conditions in the different
geographical units (census tracts).
Figure 3: Normalized bar chart plot to illustrate damage probabilities for a particular building typology in the different geographical units (census tracts).
Figure 4: Absolute bar chart plot to illustrate e.g. absolute damage extent (damaged
building floor area in square meters) for a particular building typology in the different geographical units (census tracts).
Disclaimer
The RISe software can be received free-of-charge. To receive your personal version, please send an email to Domink Lang. Although we have done our best to find and remove bugs and weaknesses of the code, we would like to point out that the software is used at the user's own risk and neither the authors nor their organizations have any responsibility for the results that are obtained with the software or the use of these results.
Users that appreciate the software may reference the user manual and/or the latest publication on RISe:
- Lang, D.H., Gutiérrez Corea, F.V., and Lindholm, C.D. (2009). RISe – Risk Illustrator for SELENA, User Manual v2.0, NORSAR, Kjeller (Norway), June 2009.
- Lang, D.H. and Gutiérrez Corea, F.V. (2009). RISe: Illustrating geo-referenced data of seismic risk and loss assessment studies using Google Earth, Technical Note, Earthquake Spectra (accepted).
Contact
For further information, suggestions or bug-reports, please contact Dominik Lang or Vladimir Gutiérrez.
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