Volunteered Geographic Information for Disaster Management

The amount of information generated and provided by citizens via the World Wide Web is constantly growing. Citizens share information, thoughts, and experiences in blogs and contribute information to web-based content sharing platforms, collaboratively created data bases that are freely usable by everybody. Disaster management as one component of urban planning to decrease a society's vulnerability can benefit from information provided by citizens. This chapter gives an overview of the application of information provided by citizens in disaster management. It points out the potential of using such information for the various phases of disaster management. Three main challenges, which affect the usefulness of information supplied by citizens, are presented in more detail: data collection, localization and quality assessment. For each of these challenges, various approaches to address them are discussed.