Thanks to the huge progress within the last 50 years in Earth Observation, Geospatial science and ICT technology, mankind is facing, for the first time, the opportunity to effectively respond to natural and artificial emergencies such as: earthquake, flood, oil spill, etc.Responding to an emergency requires to find, access, exchange, and of course understand many types of geospatial information provided by several types of sensors. Majors oil spills emergencies as, the Gulf of Mexico (Macondo/Deepwater Horizon) in 2010, the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige in 2002, have offered lessons learned and identified challenges to be addressed.Interoperability provides the principles and technologies to address those challenges. Since years interoperability has been developing based on traditional Service Oriented Architecture, request/response communication style, and implemented through Spatial Data Infrastructures. The experience handling oil spill responses shows that emergency services based on SDIs have some limitations, mainly due to their real-time peculiarity. Moreover despite the effort that Private Sector and Public Administration have been putting since years, the goal to provide an exhaustive picture of the situation during an Emergency Response is still far to be reached.We argue that to achieve this goal, we have to frame the problem in a different way. Emergency Response is not just sensing; it should be smart enough to encompass intelligent actions such as, automatically and dynamically acquire context driven information. The gaol of this paper is to define what a “smart Emergency Response System” (smartERS) should be.
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