Speakers Bio & Abstract

Biography
I have a 20 years of experience in Information Technologies applied in Geospatial domain. I worked in the private sector as employee, consultant and entrepreneur, and since 2005 I have been working in European Institutions at Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA). At the JRC I have contributed to establish the INSPIRE Directive, and currently in EMSA I am the Project Manager and Application Architect of the Earth Observation systems. Abstract
The use of geospatial and earth observation data in maritime emergency responseRecent social, environmental and natural emergencies (e.g. mass population movement from Syria to Europe, oil pollution at the delta of the Niger, floods in Myanmar) urge politician, scientific and technical communities to find adequate responses for state-of-the art Emergency and Disaster Management (EDM) solutions. Assuming that a judicious use of data can lead to well informed and good decision making, in this work we have outlined a set of requirements to take into account in order to enhance the current EDM solutions.

A key aspect of Emergency Response Systems (ERS) is the ability to plan for, and make timely decisions in a rapidly evolving situation. While Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) aims to provide such capabilities, within this analysis we have identified that nowadays emergency experts do not have the instruments to exhaustively process the unprecedented volume and variety of relevant Earth Observation data available (i.e. satellite platforms, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, in situ sensors, as well as citizen sensing information). To address this challenge we therefore considered how ERS can encompass the semantic aspects of interoperability.

Based on a specific use case, the ‘Search and Rescue’ of migrants at Sea, we concluded that a new generation of EDM solutions should enhance the overall capacity semantically correlating different types of information, and as such, provide a richer situational awareness to responding to an emergency.