FRAMEWORK FOR MULTI-RISK EMERGENCY RESPONCE Siyka Zlatanova 1 * , Daniel Holweg 2 and Manolis Stratakis 3 1 GISt, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands 2 Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany 3 FORTHnet, Crete, Greece ABSTRACT. Recent emergency situations such as large fires (in cities, forests), flooding, terrorist attacks, road-side emergency, etc, have shown the indispensable need of a geo- information in reliable systems to help rescue operations. Specialised systems are necessary not only for rescue teams but also for ordinary people in/around the area with emergency occurrences. The presented framework for the use of geo-information in emergency response is motivated by fast developments in hand-held industry and maturing 3D GIS. Presently, almost everyone possesses a handheld device. A process of convergence is observed overall: Cell phones incorporate functionality, which was the domain of ultra-portable computers, while later ones are updated with communication abilities. GIS are in growing expansion and changing nature. The third dimension is getting increasingly familiar. Many GIS vendors already provide extended 3D visualisation although spatial analysis is still in the 2D domain. The traditional stand-alone, desktop GIS evolve into a complex system architecture in which DBMS play the critical role of a container of administrative, geometric and multimedia data. This paper promotes wider utilisation of 3D geo-information in an integrated system for different types of users (working in different environments) and decision-makers in the response phase. The paper is organized in three general sections. The first section discusses requirement for such a system taking into account different factors. The second section outlines the proposed system architecture. The third section provides an elaborated discussion on needed research and developments. 1. Requirements for technical support in emergency response Defining requirements for a disaster management system is a huge task that needs investigations of different aspects: type of disaster, phases in disaster management, involved people, available technology, etc. The consideration of any of these individually reveals the complexity of the problem. Two examples follow. Intuitively the classification of hazards is done regarding the hazard’s origin. So the usual classes are natural (e.g. flood, landslides, earthquake, tsunami, volcanoes, etc.) and human-caused (e.g. industrial accidents, fires, terrorist attacks, etc.) hazards. However, other classifications (e.g. Stingfield, 1996) are known from literature. The authors distinguish between: • Primary disasters such as: fire, power outage, terrorism (bombing incidents, bomb threat, taking of hostages, etc.), chemical releases (radioactive materials, toxic gases, etc.), earthquake, flood, hurricanes, etc. • Secondary disasters. For example, an earthquake could cause a structural fire, which may in turn burn out circuits resulting in a power failure. Apparently, it is difficult to consider only one type of disaster. Floods near industrial areas may cause industrial hazards (explosions, fire, etc.); power failure may result in an explosion and damage of dike, which consequently may transform in a flood disaster; earthquakes may provoke landslides, etc. Therefore, risk management is often mentioned in this context (Bell and Glide, 2004). The Federal Emergency Management Agency (http://www.fema.gov) of the USA suggested four phases to describe disaster management namely: Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery. These phases are * Corresponding author: s.zlatanova@otb.tudelft.nl