Global Emergency Management Information Network Initiative: GEMINI

1.1 Motivations In modern technological societies, disasters, accidents, calamities or catastrophes have more and more large range, are always more frequently caused by human-made modifications of the humankind habitat, and, in consequence, may lead to various hardly recoverable losses, and represents the risk level not acceptable by public opinion. Nowdays, many serious disasters are complex, conditioned by numerous factors, and have the range which 50 years ago was not yet imaginable. The complexity of the means employed in coping with emergency are adequate to the human technological resources, but always, a bottleneck of the efficacy of the emergency management remain human factor. The efficient real-time management of high-risk events in the large territorial scale, requires from emergency operators, capabilities exceeded individual human possibilities, and needs well structured cooperation in frame of the hierarchical emergency management organizations. Some false decisions of top-emergency managers can multiple human, economical, and cultural losses instead of the mitigation of a disaster situation. On the other hand, the current explosive information technologies development offers the wide spectrum of qualitatively new tools which may support the top-managerial decisions in significant manner . Active Decision Support Systems based on novel intelligent agent technology should, in the near future, not only provide data selected according to situation assessment procedures, previously defined in emergency plans, but they should: immediately resolve less important problems required only expert competencies, present some alternative decisions and criteria involved, soft supervise emergency managers decisions according to the general criterion “don’t increase current losses generation processes”.