Abstract
Natural disasters have been an integral part of human history, regardless of geographical location. With the recent innovations in knowledge and data technologies, businesses have been collecting and analyzing data for decades to discover underlying trends and patterns. With massive amount of information available, authorities and rescuers should consider using relevant data to optimize natural disaster management processes. One of the recent techniques is to utilize data analytics where pertinent data is visualized in an easy to understand way. This paper aims at making a systematic review of scholarly literature in analyzing the trends of data analytics of natural disaster management and highlighting the present status of the emerging digital technologies in providing meaningful and effective intervention as solutions in natural disaster management. This paper will first presents the visual definition of natural disaster management and describes the role of data analytics; it will then illustrate the findings and gives future recommendations after a systematic literature review. A bibliometric analyses of researches on data analytics of natural disaster management in journals published from 2010 to 2020 are presented. Various relevant datasets are obtained by performing a series of topical searches using relevant keywords based on Scopus and Web of Science (WOS) search engines. Aggregation between the two sets of data are also conducted in order to avoid redundancy. Published documents are further analyzed using category ‘by source’, ‘by author and affiliation’, by country/territory’, ‘by type or subject area’, and ‘by funding sponsor’. Relevant outputs from SciVal (of Scopus) and Clarivate Analytics (of WOS), respectively are also offered to strengthen the conclusion. Findings conclude that despite the practicality of data analytics that is fast becoming a major trend in recent years, there is still lack of implementation in natural disaster management. Opportunities are also identified based on the needs for this research to be activated and expanded by leveraging on this emerging digital technologies ecosystem. In the event where natural disaster occurred, data analytics can sit on top of business intelligence and big data systems or any other ordinary database, to monitor and detect natural hazards, mitigate their impact, support in relief efforts, and contribute to the recovery and reconstruction processes. Keywords: data analytics, emerging digital technologies, bibliometric, natural disaster management, Scopus, Web of Science
