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Geo-information technology offers an opportunity to support disaster management: industrial accidents, road collisions, complex emergencies, earthquakes, fires, floods and similar catastrophes (for example the recent huge disaster with the Tsunami in South-East Asia on 26 December 2004). Access to needed information, facilitation of the interoperability of emergency services, and provision of high-quality care to the public are a number of the key requirements.
Such requirements pose significant challenges for data management, discovery, translation, integration, visualization and communication based on the semantics of the heterogeneous (geo-) information sources with differences in many aspects: scale/resolution, dimension (2D or 3D), classification and attribute schemes, temporal aspects (up-to-date-ness, history, predictions of the future), spatial reference system used, etc.
The book provides a broad overview of the (geo-information) technology, software, systems needed, used and to be developed for disaster management. The book provokes a wide discussion on systems and requirements for use of geo-information under time and stress constraints and unfamiliar situations, environments and circumstances.
From the contents: User Needs and Requirements.- Data Collection and Data Management.- Data Integration and Knowledge Discovery.- End-User Environments.- Positioning and Location-Based Communication.- Information Systems for Specific DM Applications.
From the reviews of the first edition:
"This book provides a welcome addition to the literature on geo-information for disaster management. a ] previous literature on this topic has been scattered a ] . It is therefore exceedingly useful to have a consolidated range of papers in one publication. a ] students, researchers, developers and users of geo-information in the disaster-management field will find this book an excellent resource. It clearly demonstrates how varied this field is a ] . the book covers a large range of both natural and man-made disaster-management issues." (Catherine Lowe, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, Vol. 33, 2006)
