Integrating User-generated Information for Emergency Management

Geospatial technologies have evolved to offer users the functionality of data access and to model development to generate information. Nowadays Spatial Data Infrastructures represent the SOA paradigm in geospatial terms offering a set of interoperable distributed components to access, visualize and process data forming the Geospatial Web. Fostered by the European directive INSPIRE many public and private organizations keep on creating and publishing these geospatial data and tools through open services with standard interfaces to manage environmental information. Although the benefits of doing this are high, they are sometimes overcome by the efforts of implementing, configuring and maintaining these standard services. On other hand information technology and the Web are evolving to more collaborative environments through social networks forming what is being called Web 2.0 which purpose is actually to publish and share information, that is, in fact, the same goal as the Geospatial Web is pursuing. While the Web 2.0 is providing users with simple and easy interfaces with centralized infrastructures in which are exponentially adding content, Geospatial Web offers users a set of complex interfaces to maintain interoperable Geospatial Web Services. What we propose in this paper is Web 2.0-principles-based mechanisms for the current Geospatial technologies to facilitate and speed up the sharing of geospatial resources. We propose mechanisms to wrap user generated information and tools generating automatically standard services hiding the underlying technology. The availability of this information through standard services improve data and system interoperability providing rapid ways to access these data improving decision making during disaster and emergency management situations. * Corresponding author. This is useful to know for communication with the appropriate person in cases with more than one author.