Developed in the context of emergency management to ensure much needed advances in civil protection, the WEB GIS Platform will assist wildfire early warning, control and civil protection, which requires advanced computing applications and intensive computing.The Platform is based on Microsoft® Bing Maps™, ESRI ArcGIS and other commercial software, in order to easily and promptly share information and tools produced by the Geography of Natural Disasters Laboratory, Department of Geography at the University of the Aegean (http://catastrophes.geo.aegean.gr/).  The initiative has been funded by Microsoft Research.

The outcomes of this initiative will feed into VENUS-C (Virtual Multidisciplinary Environments Using Cloud Infrastructures - www.venus-c.eu), a new European research and technological project currently under negotiation with the European Commission, which is aimed at bringing, in twenty-four months, new scientific applications to the cloud for the benefit of European scientific communities. The Virtual Fire App is as one of seven applications across four thematic areas currently part of the VENUS-C portfolio: Biomedicine (Bio-informatics and System Biology, Drug Discovery), Civil Engineering (Building Information Management, Structural Analysis) Data for Science (Aquamaps) and Civil Protection and Emergencies. The project’s application portfolio will grow over time through an Open Call designed to broaden the geographic and scientific scope of the project.

Media Release: Virtual Fire App to Run on Cloud