Towards an Integrated Concept for Geographical Information Systems in Disaster Management

Disaster management takes current information technologies 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 experience from many different pro-jects and systems has shown that these issues cannot be considered inde-pendently from each other. Therefore this paper proposes a concept ad-dressing all issues by providing an integrated solution. For this purpose the paper focuses on content based searches for satellite images in a distrib-uted environment.