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The extreme increase in flood events and flood damage during recent decades makes it obvious that an integrated approach is crucial to flood protection. Many issues, such as technical measures, aerial and spatial management, retrofitting, raising risk awareness etc., have to be incorporated into the complex field of Integrated Flood Management (IFM). The designed EC framework directive for flood risk management underlines the necessity for this comprehensive approach. As far as spatial management is concerned, aspects of water and flood management are often either insufficiently or belatedly included in the planning process. Another problem is that flood and planning issues are not regarded and dealt with on the level of river basins but are subject to administrative boundaries. At the same time, aspects of geodata infrastructure and flood related data and information have to be considered as a crucial interface in a concept for integrated planning. In the context of an EU Interreg IIIb project named FLOWS (www.flows.nu), an interdisciplinary group of the University of Lüneburg, the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg and the City of Hamburg developed a planning instrument which integrates water management and flood aspects in spatial and city planning on the scale of a river basin, with the aim of reducing flood impacts and at the same time improving the ecological situation. The interfacial requirements on technical and computer-based tools such as Decision Support Systems (DSS) were also considered. The very urban area of the City of Hamburg and rural parts of Lower Saxony in Germany served as project areas. In this scheme, a thorough process and structure analysis was accomplished to investigate data and planning structures, planning processes and cooperation between water management and spatial planning and planning deficits. By means of interviews and workshops with practitioners the planning instrument and the DSS were developed in order to improve implementation on an operational level for working out mid- and long term planning strategies.

Current software for estimating potential losses from hazards uses GIS software in order to display results of damage analysis on a map. In parallel, within the fields of geographic visualization and GISc systems capable of visualizing data for entire planets are starting to appear. One of the new challenges in this context is to develop a simple and intuitive general purpose navigation mode that will work well for a single planet from outer space to a street level. Such works are missing today. Although the need for global navigation in disaster management applications is rather conceptual than practical, introducing a conceptually better navigation mode has positive practical consequences also for applications in this field. By better concept for a navigation mode we mean: The navigation become generally usable around the whole globe regardless location of the viewpoint or level of detail used for the scene rendering; the navigation is intuitive for humans; and the navigation is simple by utilizing a single set of straightforward mathematical relations. In this text we introduce such global navigation mode, which has been implemented in Grifinor system.

The ability to navigate a 3d virtual environment in real-time has a high priority in connection with different applications for disaster management. This paper presents GRIFINOR – a platform for applications within this area. As a part of GRIFINOR, three new innovations have been promoted. They are presented in this paper as well. In many situations it is important that geoinformation can be accessible for queries within a very short time-frame (minutes). Questions about spatial reasoning and volumetric calculations in connection with different types of simulation has been very dependent on a priori models and very fast computer graphics hardware and software. It is also essential that the features of the model become real objects with attributes etc. Urban 3d models have traditionally been built as wire frame models. This makes it very difficult and in some situations impossible to attach geoinformation to the spatial structure in a way so that it is useful for real-time navigation in 3d. These wire frame models are not suitable for either a connection to a spatial database or for spatial queries. Centre for 3D GeoInformation at Aalborg University, is developing a system that handles 3D data structures as objects with facilities to support real-time geovisualization. The need for a new concept in this area has been one of the major motivations for the development of GRIFINOR. Instead of dealing with simple geometry in a CAD-based environment, GRIFINOR is developed to support object-oriented technology.