  A GIS based software is presented which permits the estimation of seismic
vulnerability and the presentation of results in digital maps for single
houses, groups of buildings, parts of settlements or even complete towns.
Nicaragua is a country with a high seismic activity. The assessment of seismic
vulnerability requires the execution of distinct tasks, e.g. recollection of
field data, integration of data from the municipal cadastre, reprocessing or
screening to test the reliability of the data, definition of calculation of
vulnerability functions, calculation of vulnerability for single objects as
houses or buildings, calculation of mean vulnerability for certain areas as
barrios or squares. In order to reduce time and effort to be spent with several
unspecialized tools and procedures, an integrated software system was created,
the user of which has not to care about separate software tools for each part
of the process. The main advantage of the software is the combination of
Geographical Information System (GIS) with the logics that surrounds the
specific methodologies of seismic vulnerability index, index of damages and
presentation of results. The new software uses a connection with an external
centralized Enterprise Data Base which stores all the input information and
calculation results and which is automatically synchronized for the
presentation of results using GIS. The cadastral information contains data on
the constructive type of the house, dimensions, year of construction, type of
walls, roof, number of inhabitants, etc.. The system also allows to present
damage scenarios for specific seismic events with given hypocenter and
magnitude. The documentation of the software serves as a guide for students
working on object oriented software engineering by using unified modeling
language (UML) and software logic architecture (3-tiers).
