Buildings and Crowds: Forming Smart Cities for More Effective Disaster Management

During the recent years, several advances about smart environments are taking place. The challenge of transforming cities to 'smart' cities aims to combine competitiveness and sustainable urban development simultaneously. This is taking place through the combination of traditional urban environment, governmental and social functions with modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) providing e-services. At the same time, next generation technologies community puts efforts on issues associated with the development of community-based services that aim to capture and assess large amounts of data in a systematic collaborative manner. Thus, the concept of crowd sourcing becomes quite popular. In this paper we focus on discussing whether crowd sourcing can be facilitated in the contexts of smart buildings and cities in order to support a more effective and efficient integrated disaster management approach. Within this context, we exemplify the approach using few model architecture diagrams.