Study on emergency mapping technology in rapid response

More and more urgent issues happen in our daily life, such as typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, floods, epidemics and terrors. Spatial information plays a very important role in these emergency responses. Map is the most direct representation of spatial information. Emergency map can be used in the four emergency management phases of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Before a potential disaster, emergency map can help us mitigate the impact of a hazard in risk assessment and the development of long-term mitigation strategies. In the preparedness and response phases, emergency map help to make decision and command, and emergency map help to restore the damage after the disaster. Emergency mapping developed in many countries. But emergency mapping also has shortcomings on the source data, the mapping standards, and the map period time and how to provide high performance emergency mapping services. An example application of emergency mapping in the forest fire rapid response has showed how to gather data, analyze information and design symbols and output map.