Kolloquium Geoinformatik GIScience for GEOscience: challenges and opportunities in a risky world

The assessment of risk arising from the increasingly complex and vulnerable urban areas being exposed to natural hazards is a matter of cross-disciplinarity, patience and creativity, and is more and more a matter of geo-information. In order to match the requirements of practitioners and end-users, risk estimates have to precisely catch the relevant features of the built environment and its complex and vulnerable infrastructure. This requires the harmonisation of heterogeneous data sources, from remote sensing to authoritative and volunteered geoinformation, and calls upon new methodologies to collect, process and aggregate each “atomic” information into dynamic, multi-scale and uncertainty-aware models. The increasing availability of large scale loosely structured geoinformation paves the way to the application of (geo)statistical learning (artificial intelligence) techniques, but also advocates for a stronger cooperation among professionals with very different background. In this talk I will review some of our recent research activities where seismology, engineering and different flavours of GIScience are playing together to address trending issues in exposure and vulnerability modelling and in post-earthquake damage mapping.