Ever so often, nature challenges us through disasters such as earthquakes, wild fires, floods, hurricanes etc. Countering disasters requires expertise from various agencies such as Fire Departments, Paramedics, Urban Search and Rescue Teams, Red Cross, Hospitals, Shelters, etc, and other organizations such as Department of Transportation, the Armed Forces or even NASA, depending on the nature of disaster. A successful choreography of the rescue operation in which time is of essence, requires careful coordination of the efforts of all these teams at the disaster site. This necessitates sharing of information not only in real-time, but also conveying the information to the intended party precisely and relevantly, while adhering to the models of incident command. I propose in this thesis to research, design and implement a distributed, real-time infrastructure for a visualization-based disaster recovery tool.

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