This release represents a major step forward in the InaSAFE project with key new features being added to support aggregation and post processing (for demographic breakdowns). InaSAFE has also received an interface and error messaging makeover and have had a number of useful new tools for scenario assessment added. There are also many changes you can’t see easily – including a major revision to the source code to improve its consistency and organisation.

We’ve also been hard at work to support multiple languages in every part of the project – our website, the application user interface, help documentation etc. If you have any questions or want to contribute to the project, please don’t hesitate to contact us at our new email address: info@inasafe.org

Key updates:

Improvements to InaSAFE panel

We have overhauled the InaSAFE panel in QGIS. The question area hides itself away based on the context of what you are doing so that you have more space to view the report in. The report area has been spruced up with our new messaging system with a clearer layout and the inclusion of InaSAFE branding at the top of the report area.

Icon and branding overhaul

We have updated the branding of InaSAFE to reflect the new logo that will be used in the software, web site and promotional materials. At the same time we tried to make the icons clearer and more recognisable.

Aggregation and post-processing

A major new enhancement in this release it support for aggregated results. Aggregation allows you to specify an additional layer when defining the analysis criteria. This layer will be used to provide a by-area breakdown of the results of the analysis. For example if you are carrying out an analysis for a city, you can use district areas within the city to provide per-area results. In the absence of an aggregation layer, the analysis extent is used as the aggregation unit.

The new post-processing support provides an extensible framework for computing at-risk population demographics per aggregation area. For example, in this image you can see the impact summary report provides a break down of the gender and age demographics for ‘kapubaten’ in Jakarta (using a flood scenario). In the gender report you can see that based on the standard female / male population ratio, the assessment suggests extra food provisions should be made available to cater for lactating women.

Post processors are configurable (by pressing the button next to the impact function chooser). For example in the image here we can see options (highlighted in red) for adjusting the age ratios used for the age breakdown post-processor.

Minimum needs

All impact functions which use population for exposure will now compute minimum needs based on standard ‘Perka 7’ guidelines. In addition, these guideline daily requirements can be overridden in the new impact function configuration options dialog (accessed by clicking the button to the right of the impact function combo as shown in the image here).

New configuration options

We have added two new options (for developers / power users) in the configuration panel.

• The first lets you choose which backend to use when computing zonal stats – the QGIS native implementation or our InaSAFE implementation. Note: This is an advanced feature added due to limitations with the QGIS Zonal Stats implementation in QGIS 1.8.
• The second option lets you enable developer mode which is used to view source output in the dock reporting area. Note: This is an advanced option intended for use by developers.

Minimum needs tool

We have added a new tool for computing minimum needs. Using this tool you can compute Perka 7 requirements for displaced people. The tool requires a QGIS polygon layer loaded with an attribute column containing the number of displaced people per area. When the tool is run, a new layer will be added which contains the original polygons and new attributes giving the weekly requirements of drinking water, clean water, rice, toilets and family kits.

Shakemap Importer

Shakemaps are useful for carrying out contingency planning for the event of an earthquake. Normally these are distributed as grid.xml files which are not usable in InaSAFE or QGIS. We have added a new tool that will import a grid.xml file as a GEOTIFF file from where it can be used within InaSAFE. Two different interpolation algorithms can be used during the import process – nearest neighbour and Inverse Distance. After the conversion, the tool automatically creates InaSAFE keyword metadata for the layer so that it can be used immediately for analysis.

Save scenario

We have added a new tool which lets you save the current scenario as a scenario text file. Used in conjunction with the Batch Runner tool, you can use this tool to easily define a list of scenarios for the batch runner to use.

OSM Buildings Downloader

InaSAFE supports the use of building data in various impact functions. In particular we support building footprints sourced from the OpenStreetMap project (OSM). However, there hasn’t thus far been an easy way to import OSM into InaSAFE. With version 1.2.0 of InaSAFE we now provide a simple tool to facilitate this. The tool requires internet connection as it fetches the data via a web service running on Linfiniti’s OSM Reporter web site.

The data, once downloaded will be available to you as a shapefile. A style file is automatically created so that it symbolises nicely in QGIS. In addition, the correct keyword metadata is created for the downloaded dataset so that it can be used directly in InaSAFE impact scenario analyses.

Note: The building downloader service has limitations as to the size of datasets that can be retrieved. As such you may experience issues trying to fetch e.g. country wide building footprint data. Generally datasets at a city level and below should work well.

Batch Runner

We have added a new batch runner tool to InaSAFE. With this tool you can setup numerous scenarios and run them all in one go. A typical use case may be where you define a number of e.g. flood impact scenarios all using a standard dataset e.g. flood.shp. As new flood data becomes available you replace flood.shp and rerun the scenarios using the batch runner. Using this approach you can quickly produce regional contingency plans as your understanding of hazards changes. When you run the batch of scenarios, pdf reports are generated automatically and all placed in a single common directory making it easy for you to browse and disseminate the reports produced.

When the batch process completes, it will also produce a summary report like this:

InaSAFE Batch Report File
-----------------------------
P: gempa bumi Sumatran fault (Mw7.8)
P: gempa di Yogya tahun 2006
P: banjir jakarta 2007
P: Tsunami di Maumere (Mw 8.1)
P: gempa Mw6.5 Palu-Koro Fault
P: gunung merapi meletus
-----------------------------
Total passed: 6
Total failed: 0
Total tasks: 6
-----------------------------

For advanced users there is also the ability to batch run python scripts using this tool, but this should be considered an experimental feature still at this stage.

New website launched

We are pleased to announce our new website at https://inasafe.org which is a substantial overhaul of our old site. The new site sports our new project branding and is fully translatable so that in the future we can offer it in many languages. Currently English and Bahasa Indonesia are supported. The site also tries to present information in a clear consistent way and we have made many updates to the content throughout the site.