Geo-information technologies have proven to offer a variety of opportuni-ties for management and recovery in the aftermath of man-made and natural disasters such as industrial accidents, road collisions, complex emergencies, earthquakes, fires, floods and similar catastrophes. Intelligent context-aware technologies can provide access to needed information, facilitate the inter-operability of emergency services, and provide high-quality care to the pub-lic.

However, disaster management poses significant challenges for data col-lection, monitoring, processing, management, discovery, translation, inte-gration, visualisation and communication of information. Challenges to geo-information technologies are rather extreme due to the heterogeneous in-formation sources with differences in many aspects: scale/resolution, di-mension (2D or 3D), classification and attribute schemes, temporal aspects (up-to-date-ness, history, predictions of the future), spatial reference system used, etc.

Recognising the importance of the use of geo-information in disaster management, several universities (Delft University of Technology, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Ryerson University, University of Waterloo, York University; Canada), international organisations (ISPRS, UNOOSA, EU, ICA, FIG, OGC) and vendors (Bentley, Intergraph, Oracle, PCI) have taken the initiative to organise an annual symposium, to bring to-gether researchers, developers, data providers and users from different coun-tries and continents. The goal of the symposium is to facilitate the use of geo-information in disaster management by:

• review tools, software, existing geo-information sources, organisa-tional structures and methods for work in crisis situations
• outlining drawbacks in current use, discovery, integration and ex-change of geo-information,
• making suggestions for future research directions and
• capacity building