Online Social Networks (OSN) are privileged observation channels for understanding the geospatial facets of many real-world phenomena [1]. Unfortunately, in most cases OSN content lacks explicit and structured geographic information, as in the case of Twitter, where only a minimal fraction (1% to 4%) of messages are natively geotagged [2]. This shortage of explicit geographic information drastically limits the exploitation of OSN data in geospatial Decision Support Systems (DSS) [3]. Conversely, the prompt availability of geotagged content would empower existing systems and would open up the possibility to develop new and better geospatial services and applications [4, 5]. As a practical example of this kind, several social media-based systems have been proposed in recent years for mapping and visualizing situational information in the aftermath of mass disasters - a task dubbed as crisis mapping - in an effort to augment emergency response [6, 7]. These systems, however, demand geotagged data to be placed on crisis maps, which in turn imposes to perform the geoparsing task on the majority of social media content. Explicit geographic information is not only needed in early warning [8, 9] and emergency response systems [10, 11, 12, 13, 14], but also in systems and applications for improving event promotion [15, 16], touristic planning [17, 18, 19], healthcare accessibility [20], news aggregation [21] Post-print of the article published in Decision Support Systems 136, 2020. Please refer to the published version: doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2020.113346

Disaster events occur around the world and cause significant damage to human life and property. Earth observation (EO) data enables rapid and comprehensive building damage assessment (BDA), an essential capability in the aftermath of a disaster to reduce human casualties and to inform disaster relief efforts. Recent research focuses on the development of AI models to achieve accurate mapping of unseen disaster events, mostly using optical EO data. However, solutions based on optical data are limited to clear skies and daylight hours, preventing a prompt response to disasters. Integrating multimodal (MM) EO data, particularly the combination of optical and SAR imagery, makes it possible to provide all-weather, day-and-night disaster responses. Despite this potential, the development of robust multimodal AI models has been constrained by the lack of suitable benchmark datasets. In this paper, we present a BDA dataset using veRy-hIGH-resoluTion optical and SAR imagery (BRIGHT) to support AI-based all-weather disaster response. To the best of our knowledge, BRIGHT is the first open-access, globally distributed, event-diverse MM dataset specifically curated to support AI-based disaster response. It covers five types of natural disasters and two types of man-made disasters across 12 regions worldwide, with a particular focus on developing countries where external assistance is most needed. The optical and SAR imagery in BRIGHT, with a spatial resolution between 0.3-1 meters, provides detailed representations of individual buildings, making it ideal for precise BDA. In our experiments, we have tested seven advanced AI models trained with our BRIGHT to validate the transferability and robustness. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ChenHongruixuan/BRIGHT. BRIGHT also serves as the official dataset for the 2025 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest.