EM-DAT has a brand new website!

EM-DAT has a brand new website!

A retrospective

The EM-DAT website has a long history behind it, which we have traced on the Wayback Machine. Initially, the EM-DAT project was promoted on the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) website. This was in the year 2000, at a time when the World Wide Web had not yet celebrated its 10th birthday.

In 2004, EM-DAT obtained its own website, which was maintained until October 2007, before migrating to its current domain name: www.emdat.be. In 2009, the content management system (CMS) was updated and EM-DAT acquired a look that it would keep for 6 years.

In 2015, the website was revamped again, while still using the same content management system.

In 2022, the content management system was found to be outdated and difficult to maintain. The EM-DAT team, therefore, decided to move towards new technology to offer the latest EM-DAT website in May 2023. The website is much faster, lighter and thus greener, and more maintainable, so sharing content with our community will be easier!

More than just a superficial update

The new website is not the only update that concerns EM-DAT. For over a year, the CRED team has been working on modernizing the entire IT infrastructure of EM-DAT. So stay tuned, as in 2023 we will bring you more news to introduce our improvements. As a teaser, here’s what you can expect in the coming months:

• An update of the database model: in appearance, there will be few changes for the user, but this update is essential to allow for the updating of the EM-DAT data encoding interface and to be able to adapt to future needs. Greatly simplified, queries on the database will be easier, which will facilitate the development of an EM-DAT API in the future.
• A new documentation: we have worked to provide a much more comprehensive and transparent documentation. A major advantage is that the documentation is versionable, which will allow for documenting the changes made to the database and, thereby, to implement them to address new challenges in disaster data.