THE PROCESS OF DIGITALIZATION IN EMERGENCY AND DISASTER MANAGEMENT: OVERVIEW ON DEVELOPMENT, INTEGRATION, RESEARCH GAPS, AND PERSPECTIVES

Emergency and disaster management is a highly complex and above all a highly critical field regarding data and information management. The retrieval, preparation, processing and digestion, and above all regarding the condensation, visualization and sharing of data and information are of vital importance but do not fully take advantage of the benefits of the developments in digitalization. Besides the issues of a sensible selection of the relevant data formats, the question of the integration of digital data and the transformation into potentially pre-selected information and lastly towards situational awareness is key for timely, efficient, and effective interventions. This paper will show an overview of the development of the process of digitalization of data and information use. Basing on selected examples, potential solutions and tool implementations will be shown and the specifics and challenges of the integration and processing of relevant data and information leading to innovative perspectives of efficient disaster management in the future will be outlined.