Improving information standards and remote sensing support for disaster management

Effective remote sensing support to disaster management may require rethinking the processes, standards, and life-cycles for data management. These have traditionally emphasized the viewpoints and concerns of data providers and their immediate operational clients. But particularly in disaster management, there is a need to make end users more central to the design and evolution of the services infrastructure, so as to account for local variability and rapid evolution of user needs. State of the art online data services now provide opportunities to let users request and receive custom products on demand; manipulate them with ubiquitous software tools; and share them across social networks. The resulting “product lifecycle” offers both challenges and unprecedented opportunities for the design and development of geospatial and remote sensing systems in support of disaster management.