Designing Information Marketplaces for Disaster Management.

Disaster management always needs to strike a balance between preparedness and flexibility. The challenges of industrial crisis information management are manifold, out of which we address the question: How to create the best possible information sharing solution for a given environment and crisis situation? This ongoing design science research has identified essential components to be assembled in an ‘information sharing kit’, including description of informational needs, data model, categorization of ICT components, and guidelines for kit usage. All of these can and should be further developed towards a localized crisis information sharing kit, on the basis of which specific information sharing solutions can be set up in order to create information marketplaces for response and recovery whenever crises occur. Insights from this research are expected to inform disaster preparation in practice, especially in ICT empowered community settings such as smart cities, and to identify more clearly the (research) needs for standardization in disaster-related information management and integration.