The GLIDE numbering system was designed 'to facilitate linkages between records in diverse disaster databases'.

The database itself contains very little information about each disaster - just enough to identify it. Disaster type | time | place | magnitude | comments
The GLIDE number is a unique code derived from the type, time, unique ID, and country code

Proposed by the Asian Disaster Reduction Centre(ADRC), the idea was taken up and implemented by Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) of the University of Louvain in Brussels (Belgium), OCHA/ReliefWeb, OCHA/FSCC, ISDR, UNDP, WMO, IFRC, OFDA-USAID, FAO, La Red and the World Bank in around 2002. It seems to me that this numbering system has yet to be widely taken up to the extent that would make it useful.

Googling the GLIDE number is one way to get disaster information separated from all the media comment and web pages with similar key words. Google found pages from ReliefWeb, ADRC, UNOSAT, DGACS and one or two others, around half of them containing maps.

The GLIDE website is extremely simple and I kept expecting more from it. But don't forget this system exists just to provide a number to link disaster data in other databases, and it does that, insofar as organisations commit to it.