Disaster Management Textbook

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Disaster management aims to reduce, or avoid, the potential losses from hazards, assure prompt and appropriate assistance to victims of disaster, and achieve rapid and effective recovery. The Disaster management cycle illustrates the ongoing process by which governments, businesses, and civil society plan for and reduce the impact of disasters, react during and immediately following a disaster, and take steps to recover after a disaster has occurred. Appropriate actions at all points in the cycle lead to greater preparedness, better warnings, reduced vulnerability or the prevention of disasters during the next iteration of the cycle.

Disaster management application is an application that contains a collection of theories about disaster management. Download now and learn how to master disaster management.

The United Nations defines a disaster as a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society. Disasters involve widespread human, material, economic or environmental impacts, which exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources.

The Red Cross and Red Crescent societies define disaster management as the organisation and management of resources and responsibilities for dealing with all humanitarian aspects of emergencies, in particular preparedness, response and recovery in order to lessen the impact of disasters.

Emergency management is a data-intensive activity which requires evaluation of many forms of data, and often consideration of combinations of data which have not been combined before. By definition, disasters involve local emergency response capacity being exceeded and relief and resilience processes called on to provide short- and long-term aid. They also involve or initiate recovery and reconstruction effort which includes the upgrading of local resilience and responses systems to avoid future problems: data gathered in any crisis, whether or not it is a disaster, is critical to avoiding or reducing the next one of its kind.

While many agencies offer standards in this area the W3C's role is pivotal, as semantic web standards (RDF in particular) enables syllogistic reasoning on simple factual constructs - which while less reliable than expert-compiled information has the merit of being instantly available. Since much of the data required in a disaster is about where/when/who, a rigorous ontology dealing well with typical relief tasks and roles would be instantly useful.

This page exists to coordinate and track related efforts, and identify any other ontology and semantic tag/link work taking place in local resilience, emergency management, relief and response, biosecurity, peacekeeping, etc..