The singular geotectonic and climatic setting of the Azores archipelago is the main reason for the recurring geological events that take place over its territory. As witnessed and reported, since its settlement in the 15th century, Azores region is being scenery for landslides, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, resulting from simple damages to loss of lives.

Aiming the improvement of the responsiveness to an occurring event as well as to the day-to-day research on multi-risk assessment, at Centro de Vulcanologia e Avaliação de Riscos Geológicos (CVARG), a great effort has been made since 2002 to create a GIS-based structure (AZORIS) that could store and manage all information available for risk analysis and provide access to the data for the interested community.

ESRI® technology is being used and, during the years, the data structure has been adapted to optimise space requirements and processing capabilities. The current data model was established taking into account the thematic, typology and geographic distribution of the information. Due to the spatial complexity of the Azores archipelago, datasets were defined for each of the islands as well as for the archipelago as a whole thus it can enclose data outside the spatial extent of the islands. Metadata has been mandatory since the beginning of the information compilation process, nevertheless, with INSPIRE directive being applied, further analysis is being required to fulfill the guidelines now defined.

The present work discusses the data model structure applied, considering the definition of the parameters for data storage and compilation.

Keywords: GIS, Geodatabases, Multi-risk, Azores