Nowadays, we are witnessing a shift in the way emergencies are being managed. On the one hand, the availability of big data and the evolution of geographical information systems make it possible to manage and process large quantities of information that can hugely improve the decision-making process. On the other hand, digital humanitarianism has shown to be very beneficial for providing support during emergencies. Despite this, the full potential of combining automatic big data processing and digital humanitarianism approaches has not been fully realized, though there is an initial body of research. This paper aims to provide a reference architecture for emergency management that instantiates the NIST Big Data Reference Architecture to provide a common language and enable the comparison of solutions for solving similar problems.