GIS Multisource Data for the Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of Buildings at the Urban Scale

The paper presents a methodology of extraction, integration and elaboration of data from different sources using the geographic information system (GIS), to realize a georeferenced building database (GBD) useful for the seismic vulnerability assessment of existing buildings on a large scale. Three levels of GIS entities have been defined and equipped with the related information: census section (CS), urban block (UB), and individual building (IB), depending on the level of detail of dataset. Additional information about the typological and structural features has been extracted by CARTIS catalogue, to refine the data associated with each building. The data have been validated using detailed information gathered on a proper sample of buildings, which have been filed and analyzed one-by-one. The alphanumeric format of data allows for the automatic implementation of different methods available in the literature, which provide a qualitative seismic vulnerability index at different scales (whole urban district, an urban block, and a single building). Finally, the 3D representation of data and results have been elaborated, providing a tool easily searchable and constantly implementable. An application has been developed for a case study in Puglia, Italy: Bisceglie, for which 3726 IB have been assessed. The work addresses the issue of the lack of information typical of large-scale applications, exploiting all the available data sources to achieve nearly complete knowledge of existing building stock finalized to a rapid but extensive evaluation of the seismic vulnerability on an urban scale with very low computational efforts and the use of limited resources in terms of time and cost.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a methodology to extract, integrate, and elaborate data using GIS for georeferenced building database creation and seismic vulnerability assessment. Validated data on different GIS entity levels enable automatic implementation of seismic vulnerability index methods at various scales.