Better Warning Solutions in Praha

Above: Conference President Milan Konecný (Past president ICA, right) from Czech Republic and Professor Gottfried Konecny from Germany (left) leading the round table meeting.

The first day already included an impressive list of keynote speeches, followed by a welcome reception, during which the president of the conference Milan Konecný characterised himself as a perfect host.

On most days of the conference, there were two or three parallel sessions with blocks of four to five presentations. They were divided into several topics: ‘frameworks and tools', ‘technologies and infrastructures' and ‘citizens in early warning and emergency management'.

With global warming and an increase in frequency of natural, humanitarian, industrial and man-made (terrorism) disasters, early warning (systems) and crisis management are getting increasingly important. The conference showed that technology keeps improving, with progress in data access, good web-based systems (geo-portals), many open standards and tests of open source solutions, with new types of virtual environments and even serious games.

At the end of the second day, there was only one session and even that one was poorly attended. The round table discussion scheduled later that evening attracted only seven people to show up and listen to the planned discussion between 10 people. The discussion on spatially enabled early warning and emergency management focussed on the gap between what researchers develop and what actual  users in the field need, and on the misuse of data; and a statement was made on the need of commercial parties participating in EU programmes. To conclude, it was agreed that pilot projects with end-users, experiments and demonstrations focused in programme areas of interest to leadership are needed to show the benefits of a spatial data infrastructure in improving decision-making.

The third day brought more worthwhile presentations and was completed with the conference's social event in a historic brewery from the beginning of the century. Traditional dishes were accompanied by liqueur and the brewery's ‘U Flekù' beer, and folkloric live music drove the attendees to dance the polka. Konecný had scheduled his speech the next morning, ensuring everybody would join in for the last morning with some more presentations and the closing session.

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