Validation of EO-derived information for crisis management: a Digital Earth perspective in the VALgEO expert community

New generation remote sensing technologies open today new application areas and demonstrate their effectiveness providing geo-information in support to disaster management. In the same time, new challenges can be identified and among them has a crucial role the validation of geo-information under the new specific constraints dictated by the disaster management application area. In the frame of the Digital Earth concept geo-information is a sharable resource, and a resource is truly shareable not only if we know the formal code used to made it – and then we can read it , but also, and in particular case during disaster if we know the reliability of this information. This is crucial in order to avoid information overflow and time wasting during the decision-making process in support to disaster management. The “International workshop on validation of geo-information products for crisis management”, VALgEO 2009, was held at the Joint Research Centre, in Ispra, Italy on 21-23 November 2009. The purpose of this first workshop was to initiate a dialogue between the main actors of Emergency Response Services around validation and to raise awareness on the necessity for an independent formal assessment of geo-information for disaster management. This special issue includes a collection of invited papers presented at the workshop. It gathers interdisciplinary initiatives where the majority of the contributions either directly or implicitly address different aspects of validation of geo-information generated following a disaster, ranging from flood information to forest fires and earthquake damage assessments.