There have been major advances in technologies to support crisis response in the last few years. However, many aspects related to the efficient collection and integration of geo-information, applied semantics and situation awareness for disaster management are still open. To advance the systems and make them intelligent, an extensive collaboration is required between emergency responders, disaster managers, system designers and researchers. To facilitate this process the Geo-information for Disaster Management (Gi4DM) conference has been organized since 2005. Gi4DM is coordinated by the Joint Board of Geospatial Information Societies (JB GIS) and the ad-hoc Committee on Risk and Disaster Management. This volume presents the results of the Gi4DM 2012 conference, held in Enschede, the Netherlands, on 13-15 December . It contains a selection of around 30 scientific and 25 best-practice peer-reviewed papers. The 2012 Gi4DM focuses on the intelligent use of geo-information, semantics and situation awareness.

The first International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Telecommunication Services (IDMS) was organized by Prof. K. Rothermel and Prof. W. Effelsberg, and took place in Stuttgart in 1992. It had the form of a national forum for discussion on multimedia issues related to communications. The succeeding event was "attached" as a workshop to the German Computer Science Conference (GI Jahrestagung) in 1994 in Hamburg, organized by Prof. W. Lamersdorf. The chairs of the third IDMS, E. Moeller and B. Butscher, enhanced the event to become a very successful international meeting in Berlin in March 1996. This short overview on the first three IDMS events is taken from the preface of the IDMS'97 proceedings (published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1309), written by Ralf Steinmetz and Lars Wolf. Both, Ralf Steinmetz as general chair and Lars Wolf as program chair of IDMS'97, organized an excellent international IDMS in Darmstadt. Since 1998, IDMS has moved from Germany to other European cities to emphasize the international character it had gained in the previous years. IDMS'98 was organized in Oslo by Vera Goebel and Thomas Plagemann at UniK - Center for Technology at Kjeller, University of Oslo. Michel Diaz, Phillipe Owezarski, and Patrick Senac successfully organized the sixth IDMS event, again outside Germany. IDMS'99 took place in Toulouse at ENSICA. IDMS 2000 continued the tradition and was hosted in Enschede, the Netherlands."

There have been major advances in technologies to support crisis response in the last few years. However, many aspects related to the efficient collection and integration of geo-information, applied semantics and situation awareness for disaster management are still open. To advance the systems and make them intelligent, an extensive collaboration is required between emergency responders, disaster managers, system designers and researchers. To facilitate this process the Geo-information for Disaster Management (Gi4DM) conference has been organized since 2005. Gi4DM is coordinated by the Joint Board of Geospatial Information Societies (JB GIS) and the ad-hoc Committee on Risk and Disaster Management. This volume presents the results of the Gi4DM 2012 conference, held in Enschede, the Netherlands, on 13-15 December . It contains a selection of around 30 scientific and 25 best-practice peer-reviewed papers. The 2012 Gi4DM focuses on the intelligent use of geo-information, semantics and situation awareness.