May 14th, 2011
Call – The Value of Geo-Information for Disaster and Risk Management

With the publication of VALID, it is intended to give evidence of the economic, humanitarian and organizational benefits of applying geoinformation in all phases of disaster management, based on analyses of representative cases, and on an expert stakeholder assessment. A publication to that end would further help

• to raise awareness in the political and programmatic environment,
• to set priorities in research and development, and
• to provide orientation for geoinformation access and delivery.

Expert Stakeholder Assessment: A reference set of different geodata product descriptions will be identified and distributed to a group of potential users, together with a template for product appraisal. This template will specify a list of criteria related to various aspects of benefit. Based on a normalized rating schedule, the experts will evaluate all reference products according to the beneficial impact which can be attributed to their application. The outcome will be a differentiated evaluation of benefits, which can be supplemented by an implementation cost estimate.

As a first step, the editorial team would like to narrow down the list of reference products for the stakeholder assessment to a limited number of relevant products. For this purpose, you are kindly asked to select from the list provided on http://www.un-spider.org/VALID-stakeholder-assessment-I those ten products that you consider most useful for your work. Participating in this survey will take you no longer than a couple of minutes and will enable the editors to compile a reference set for the detailed stakeholder assessment that corresponds to the working realities of the end users of geoinformation products for disaster management.

Deadline: This poll will close on Sunday, 5 June 2011, at midnight Central European Time.

Background: In July 2010, the Joint Board of Geospatial Information Societies (JBGIS) and UNOOSA/UN-SPIDER published ‘Geoinformation for Disaster and Risk Management – Examples and Best Practices’, a compilation of case studies that provides information on what can be done with geoinformation in support of disaster and risk management – methods, systems, applications, experiences. As a next logical step it is planned to provide information on what is the value of geoinformation – an evaluation of benefits. For more information about the publication project please go to http://www.un-spider.org/about/portfolio/publications/valid .