ABSTRACT
Natural disasters are a phenomenon of all times. However, if one considers recent events, such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and the (predicted) climate changes, as well as highly contagious and rapidly spreading diseases like SARS and avian bird u, and if one takes into account the magnitude of economic globalization that has affected our world, it is clear that understanding and solving problems resulting from these events is of prime interest to society. The geosciences obviously have a prominent role to play, but the complexity of these problems is beyond the scope of a single discipline. From a geo-information perspective, a comprehensive understanding of these problems requires multidisciplinary approaches, collaboration among experts in order to bring together knowledge, and suitable tools for dealing with the large amounts of complex spatio-temporal data that analytical solutions to these problems would generate.
