Disaster management has been attracting a lot of attention from many research communities, including that of computer science, which plays a key role in devising ways to manage and analyse data and is required for disaster management situations.

For this special issue we are particularly interested in original work (including significant works-in-progress) on the current state of research and developments in data management and analysis that will greatly benefit the disaster management community in the whole cycle of the detection, prevention, preparation, response and recovery from disasters. Contributions on information and data management that improves support for disaster management and emergency responses are solicited.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the 1st IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM'2014), but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Subject Coverage

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Querying and filtering of heterogeneous, multi-source streaming disaster data
Challenges of big data in disaster management
Context-awareness information analysis and extraction
Data mining from multiple-information and huge sources
Multi-sensor data fusion
Sensor data interoperability, analysis and interpretation
Semantic-based data mining and data pre-processing
Data acquisition, integration, cleaning and best practices
Mining and making decisions based on time-evolving and uncertain data
Human-system interactive information extraction
Uncertainty and possibly adversity in data handling and delivery
Crowd sourcing
Data management in the social web
Trust and information credibility in social networks
Damage and loss assessment
Post-disaster needs assessment
Spatiotemporal and stream data management
Geospatial data collection for disaster response
Cloud/grid/stream data mining

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper has been completely re-written and if appropriate written permissions have been obtained from any copyright holders of the original paper).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process.

All papers must be submitted online. To submit a paper, please read our Submitting articles page.

Important Dates

Submission of manuscripts: 30 November, 2014

Notification to authors: 30 December, 2014

Final versions due: 2 March, 2015


Guest Editors:
Omar Nouali and Nadia Nouali-Taboudjemat, CERIST Research Center, Algeria
Aris M. Ouksel, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA