
It was basically two workshops, one the general UN spider workshop with a wide range of people from UN, NGOs, private companies, research institutions attended and on Thursday and Friday it was the fifth UN wide meeting, which only UN people and direct providers with links to the UN could attend.
CartONG presentations, were held at the fifth UN wide meeting; the one of the activities of CartONG on Thursday and the one of use of remote sensing was on Friday. The first day was on space technology in support of risk and disaster management, with DLR, Department of water affairs Namibia, NASA, Geo Secretariat, UN spider and several National Institute of disaster management from different countries presenting.
Some interesting points :
Interesting files could be that Geo is planning to set up an information exchange platform, were also primary data will be available. However, it is in its infancy still.
http://www.earthobservations.org/
UN spider is developing a web interface for information, as well, however, and their focus will be on education, presenting methodologies, editorials, step-by-step is, and links to other webpages and institutes. It turned out that they are already some regional initiatives set up, like the SERVIR platform for the Americas which NASA helped to develop. http://www.servir.net/
In the Asian region that has been quite some development as well; http://www.jaxa.jp/index_e.html (Japanese Aerospace exploration agency)
The Belgians have developed an international disaster emergency database on http://www.emdat.be/ . It covers all disasters, dating from 1900 to 2008. I don't think it's overly relevant for us, except for historical research and setting things into context, however, I have not scoured through it. They have some preset maps in there too. Their counterpart for purely epidemic disasters can be found here http://www.cred.be/ .
An Open Source Geospatial Foundation project: Free Software Web Mapping Client Suite
Mapbender http://www.mapbender.org/Main_Page
The following webpage was mentioned by the Army promoting Geo tiffs that can be used in Adobe. That's also the format our Army satellite images were in. http://www.terragotech.com/ , so might be interesting to explore.
Generally, it sounds as if the military (US) will declassify images on a systematic basis in future to help out with humanitarian response and disaster preparedness...