Best Practice Geo in Risk and Disaster Management

09 March 2009, 2:01pm

Call for Abstracts for the "JBGIS Best Practises Booklet on Geo-information for Risk and Disaster Management"

Each year, disasters such as storms, floods, volcano outbreaks and earthquakes cause thousands of deaths and tremendous damage to property around the world, displacing tens of thousands of people from their homes and destroying their livelihoods. Many of these deaths and losses could be prevented if better information were available regarding the onset and course of such disasters. Several technologies offer the potential to improve prediction and monitoring of hazards, risk mitigation and Disaster Management, such as meteorological and Earth observation satellites, communication satellites and satellite-based positioning. Helpful application of these technologies requires a solid base of political support, legal frameworks, administrative regulations, institutional responsibility and capacity, and technical training. Early warning systems have to be part of disaster management plans and policies. Preparedness to respond is to be engrained into public awareness.

Therefore, the Joint Board of Geospatial Information Societies (JBGIS) and UN-SPIDER jointly invite to contribute to a " Best Practises Booklet on Geo-information for Risk and Disaster Management" that will create a decision support forum based on the knowledge and experience of experts and will outline the potential uses of the Geo-Information Technologies to governmental, institutional and operative decision makers all over the world. So the articles should be no lengthy scientific publications but short enough to be read during a coffee break. They should address one or more of the disaster types and technologies listed below:

Disaster Types:

· Geophysical: earthquake, tsunami, volcano, mass movement, severe storm, flood, fire, drought, extreme temperature

· Biological: epidemic, insect infestation, vector diseases

· Technological/societal: pollution (air, soil, water), industrial facilities failure, terrorist attacks, traffic break down and accidents (air, road, sea).

Technology used:

· Data collection technology: sensors (air, space, terrestrial, soil, water, etc.), products (optical and range imagery, other measurements)

· Data processing: systems for real-time monitoring/tracking, prediction and simulation

· Data management and analysis: spatio-temporal, image, moving objects and point clouds databases (models, indexing, analysis)

· Data access and sharing: SDI, Web portals, command and control systems, Net-centric systems, ontology/semantic-based applications, context-aware search.

· Data visualization: Web visualization, VR environments (Google Earth, Visual Earth, etc.), dedicated systems

· Other successfully applied geo-information technology.

The Booklet is intended to cover all regions of the world and all phases of the disaster management cycle.

Call for Abstracts

The Abstracts should not exceed 400 words and should outline a successful application, including data acquisition, information extraction and dissemination, and a clear statement of the benefits and further potential of the practice described as compared to classical methods.

The deadline for submitting the abstracts is 30 April 2009. The abstracts should be submitted as an email attachment to Prof. Piero Boccardo (piero.boccardo@polito.it).

The Committee will select a certain number of abstracts and inform the potential authors of full papers on 30 May 2009. The abstracts which are not selected for the "Best Practices Booklet" will be evaluated for the Gi4DM to be organized early 2010 in Turin Italy.

The deadline for submission of the selected full papers is 30 September 2009.

Publication and worldwide announcement of the "Best Practices Booklet" is planned on 2 July 2010 in Vienna at UNOOSA.

Joint Board of Geospatial Information Societies (JBGIS)

Geo: International