Enabling Geographic Situational Awareness in Emergency Management Bernd Resch, Dirk Schmidt, Thomas Blaschke Research Studio iSPACE Austrian Research Centers GmbH – ARC Leopoldskronstrasse 30 5020 Salzburg (bernd.resch, dirk.schmidt, thomas.blaschke) [at] researchstudio.at Abstract: Knowledge about current conditions in the environment of a disaster site is a crucial prerequisite for successful and efficient emergency management. However, hitherto approaches only allow for post-processing mechanisms analyzing the situation with hindsight. The presented system accounts for a combination of prevailing sensor data with real-time processing mechanisms to achieve situational awareness for an instantaneous assessment of environmental conditions. The methodology combines sensor technologies, communication standards and the geo-collaboration concept to a sound and broadly applicable framework. A first prototype application, the eMapBoard, has been implemented and used in the real-time exercise GNEX06. The outcomes of this practical use are also discussed in the paper. INTRODUCTION Situational awareness is a basic requirement for all actors being involved in disaster operations, on-site as well as in the mission control centre. Kevany (2005) states that in such emergency cases, the geographical location is often the most necessary information for planning coordinated rescue actions. That is why geographic information systems (GISs) will gain crucial importance in disaster management in near future. Recently, the term geo-collaboration has been widely used to describe concepts and implementations of GISs for emergency situations. The main focus of new implementations lies on interactive and intuitive user interface design and data integration from different sources as web services. Mittlboeck et al. (2006) state that maps on the internet offer substantial advantages compared to conventional paper maps such as interactive instruments like annotation functionality, individual scale adaptation, selection of the map contents etc. Traditional paper maps allow geographers to use it to synthesize, analyze and explore spatial information. It is obvious that the rise of Geographical Information Systems has stimulated these functions and has extended them (Kraak, 2003). Maps that used to be elaborate to produce can today be created in many alternative views by the single mouse click. Additionally, many more maps are produced and used, a trend multiplied by the development of Internet and especially the WWW (Peterson, 2003). Newly developed interactive geo-collaboration tools can be employed in a wide variety of application scenarios ranging from emergency planning in the case of a wild fire to the coordination of action forces during disaster management scenarios or infrastructure monitoring processes. It is widely acknowledged that GIS plays a significant role in providing informational and analytical tools to communities directly victimized by disasters. Especially natural disasters can be largely ‘explained’ by GIS-compliant data sets and can therefore be predicted to a certain extent. Typically, disaster management depends on large volumes of accurate, relevant, on-time geo- information that various different organizations systematically or not systematically create and maintain (Blaschke & Schmidt 2006). In principle, most of this information is described in