Use of Web Technologies for Raising Awareness about Seismic Risk

Earthquake problems are not new to our country. We have witnessed several moderate earthquakes in last 2 decades causing innumerable property loss and life loss. In order to minimize the losses, we need to raise the awareness about earthquake resistant design of structures. This can be achieved by spreading the information on hazard, vulnerability and risk to concerned people.

Damage caused by a seismic event depends, to a large extent, on the a priori availability of information related to estimated hazard and vulnerability and their use in proper planning and construction. With the emergence of new web technologies such as Google Maps, Ruby on Rails and AJAX, systems which are robust in harnessing the collective information can be developed. In this paper, we discuss the quantification of risk of any location using these technologies.