Information technology and communications contribution to the citizen and the ecosystem protection and prevention from forest fires workshop.

5th May 2008, Athens, Greece

WeKnowIt has participated in a workshop organized by Greek public bodies. The workshop’s topic was the information technology and communications contribution to the citizen and the ecosystem protection and prevention from forest fires. The number of the participants was about 150 from several Greek public bodies. Among the speakers were the the EU Commissioner Mr. Jesus San Miguel, the EU Commissioner for environmental issues Mr. S. Dimas, the minister of Interior, Public Administration and Decentralization Mr. P.Pavlopoulos and the minister of transport and communications Mr. K. Chatzidakis.
In the second part of the workshop, experts presented actual technologies that after research were migrated to real systems and used in the field. A number of these were on the lines of full/end-to-end solutions that could be used for monitoring the field, getting data, extracting the “useful” information and using these systems to take further actions/make decisions e.g. direct closest firemen to the fire, predict of direction of fire etc. What is more, these systems were targeted in order to create full scenario and direct the experts in specific decisions, which could be directly provided to decision makers to save time in running those scenarios when fire has occurred.
There was also a short presentation of WeKnowIt project indicating the role and the impact of the project to citizen and the ecosystem protection and prevention from forest fires and other natural disasters.