The events of 9/11/2001 greatly raised the awareness of the emergency management (EM) profession regarding the usefulness and value of Geo-information (GI) technologies and practices, resulting in a veritable revolution of research and development. As with other ‘revolutions', well-intentioned research by highly educated persons too often ‘misses the mark' for usefulness. The emergency community, dealing with life and death and extreme time pressure, is conservative when considering the use of technology. Any technology must provide usefulness to perform an actual emergency function in a way that improves the performance of emergency response. It must also be intuitive, very easily operated and reliable. And there must be accurate, timely and reliable data available or easily acquired.

One of my responsibilities in the World Trade Center response was to deal with the myriad of offerings of technology from vendors and researchers to support the response. Although fascinating, of great interest to technologists, and perhaps of use in other applications, most had to be rejected. The first reason was that use was not practical because these offerings had not already been deployed, incorporated into the standard operating procedures or the users trained prior to the event. At best they might offer usefulness in the future. The second reason was that they did not meet the real-world needs of emergency response and would not be functionally reliable under emergency conditions. Implementation in the emergency environment was therefore impractical and/or necessary data was not available.

A broad research community has emerged since 9/11/2001 focusing on GI for EM, and as an advisory participant I have developed a great concern for attention to usefulness. GI for EM is a field of applied research and, as such, the results must lead to useful solutions. As a practitioner in GI for EM, I see many gaps in capabilities and needs for new or improved technologies and practices for use. I see the research community as offering great resources of brain power, energy, rigour and funding to create solutions for the gaps and shortcomings.

Having spent some time as a research assistant professor addressing GI for EM, I am aware that applied research must employ scientific methods, conform to scientific rigour and explore alternatives that may prove ineffective, issues that the emergency responder has no concern for. This difference in perspective must be accommodated in GI for EM research projects; the realities of the emergency environment, operating procedures, time pressure and lack of data must be incorporated into the research plan and firsthand knowledge of the actual emergency requirements and appropriate measures for research analysis must be acquired. If this is not done, the results will be useless.