dg.o 2007

Information Integration and Dissemination for Disaster Management

Moderator

Louiqa Raschid, University of Maryland - College Park

Panelists

Sharad Mehrotra, University of California - Irvine

Brent Woodworth, IBM

Shiela Tajada, University of New Orleans

Gerard J. Christman, Program Manager, Office of the Secretary of Defense Technical Services, FCI

A large scale disaster brings together diverse people and organizations, and requires the discovery, modeling, integration, prioritization and dissemination of multiple, potentially complex, heterogeneous and rapidly evolving sources of data to meet their information needs. Applying information and communication technology (ICT) to disaster management is not a new concept. Despite the tremendous value of ICT, there are very few disaster management systems that exist today and none are widely deployed, Web accessible, or based on standard database technology. Organizations such as the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) team or the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are hampered in their effectiveness since they cannot deploy a disaster management system that supports information integration and dissemination. This panel brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, government and industry to address the challenges of disaster data management and discuss solution approaches.