The role of GI-supported methods in crisis management

摘要

Crisis and disaster management has become an important research field in GISduring recent years. Risk assessment and situation picture-related work areparticularly important areas of interest. There are distinct phases in differentcrises; these can be roughly divided into mitigation, preparedness, response, andrecovery. In this paper a general classification of methods in each phase is givenwith examples on recent or ongoing research projects. The framework is based onliterature and experiences from crisis and disaster-related exercises. Three casestudies are based on those exercises. The goal is to clarify the role and usability ofvarious GI-supported methods in the crisis management process by outlininga theoretical framework and presenting examples of the developed methods.Continuously increasing amount of spatially related geographic information is ahuge potential to the GI analysis and modeling methods; the concept of digitalearth is the underlying mainstream that gives lots of promise to the research anddevelopment work in this field.