Over the past decade, the international community has responded to an increasing number of major natural and man-made disasters. In parallel, the emergency management has become increasingly complex and specialized due to the necessity for various authorities and organizations to cooperate during emergency, and to the emergence of disasters of an unexpected or unknown nature. With these growing challenges, the need for more sophisticated tools for the production, sharing and integration of geospatial information without prejudice to the usability of end-user products, has given rise to a rapid development of geo-informational technologies to assist in crisis management operations. Recent events such as the earthquake in Japan, the flooding in Australia and the crisis in the Middle East and North African region showed that Earth observation, ICT and Web-mapping technologies are now playing a vital role in crisis management efforts, especially during the preparedness and response phases.

No matter what the origin of crises, their geographical context and the dimension of their impacts, there is a common need by all actors involved in crisis management for timely, relevant, usable and most of all reliable information. For the community concerned with validation of geo-information, this poses new challenges in terms of having access to methodologies that can address the increasing variety and amount of data, and that help to render validation closer to a routine process.

Following the two successful VALgEO workshops held in 2009 and 2010, we are pleased to announce the organization of the 3rd edition of the international workshop on validation of geo-information for crisis management. The annual VALgEO workshop sets out to act as an integrative agent between the needs of practitioners in situation centers and in the field guiding the Research and Development community, with a special focus on the quality of information.

For more information have a look at our leaflet...