Survey of data management and analysis in disaster situations

The area of disaster management receives increasing attention from multiple disciplines of research. A key role of computer scientists has been in devising ways to manage and analyze the data produced in disaster management situations. In this paper we make an effort to survey and organize the current knowledge in the management and analysis of data in disaster situations, as well as present the challenges and future research directions. Our findings come as a result of a thorough bibliography survey as well as our hands-on experiences from building a Business Continuity Information Network (BCIN) with the collaboration with the Miami-Dade county emergency management office. We organize our findings across the following Computer Science disciplines: data integration and ingestion, information extraction, information retrieval, information filtering, data mining and decision support. We conclude by presenting specific research directions. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.