Geo-information for Disaster Management

3S of ISPRS

September, 2010, Novosibirsk, Russia

Why (3D) geo-information

Recent floods, fires, industrial accidents have clearly demonstrated that the whole disaster management sector is under pressure for better, more elaborated and appropriate means for facing man-made and natural risks and reducing vulnerability of certain regions. An extended cooperation is needed across different sectors such as the health sector, police, fire brigade and civil protection (responding to incidents and disasters) on one hand, and risk managers, urban planners and local authorities (dealing with mitigation and risk prevention toward sustainable development) on the other hand.

To support their tasks, new systems are being developed that allow different communities to operate together (to understand each other) in any situation. New geo-information based models have been developed to support decision making in emergency response, risk management and urban planning. In this respect, appropriate Spatial Information Infrastructure (SII) based on semantic domain models is increasingly considered as a critical aspect of decision making in disaster management.

This course intends to give the state-of-the art information on use of geo-information technology and risk and emergency management and to discuss potential of the third dimension. While a lot of progress is observed in developing models and systems to deal with 2D geo-information (EU funded projects on emergency response such as ORCHESTRA, OASIS, WIN, etc.), the use of 3D geo-information in disaster management is still underestimated. The 3D models, if used, are mostly for visualisation and hardly for performing spatial analysis. Navigation and evacuation in buildings is mostly based on 2D floor plans, which in many cases is largely insufficient. 3D geo-information has the potential to provide more natural and flexible environments for communication and cooperation, which are similar to real world and which should support the decision-making process in a much more efficient way.

Who should attend

This school is intended for MSc, PhD, PostDoc students and other young researchers dealing with risk and disaster management aspects and willing to learn and better apply 3D GI-technology in their work.

Learning Aims

• To understand the roles and responsibilities of actors involved in risk and disaster management and to be able to understand and define the domain semantics.
• To get familiar with applications for risk and disaster management that use geo-information
• To analyse the potential of current 3D GIS technology to support decision making.
• To examine the current bottlenecks in the use of geo-information technologies.
• To study how semantics enrichment could overcome the current limitations in data sharing

Preliminary program

The course will consist of lecture and assignments (individual or group). The tentative programme of the course is as follows:
Day 1, lectures

• Risk and Emergency Management Basics
• 3D Geo-information technology

Day 1, practicals

• Discuss data for a specific disaster

Day 2, lectures

• GI technologies for Disaster Management in practice
• Context-aware approaches and semantic enrichment

Day 2, practicals

• Design your own model/system for emergency response