Towards an integrated concept for geographical information systems in disaster management

Abstract

Disaster management takes current information technology to its limits due to the very large amount of relevant data and tight response times. This is in particular true for satellite data which needs to be retrieved from different archives, processed an interpreted. Typical issues are efficiency of database access, integration of multiple heterogeneous sites and quality of image interpretation. Unfortunately experiences from many different projects and systems have shown that these issues cannot be considered independently from each other. Therefore this paper proposes a concept addressing the mentioned issues by providing an integrated solution. For this purpose the paper focuses on content based searches for satellite images in a distributed environment. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.