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GCN Home > 09/18/06 issue

State developing online humanitarian relief maps

More detailed application to improve aid to disaster victims

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

People in Pangandaran, Indonesia, lived in quiet obscurity until around 3:40 p.m. on July 17, when an offshore earthquake sent a deadly, nine-foot tsunami to Java’s coast. Within hours, humanitarian organizations mobilized to bring help to Pangandaran and other coastal towns, where the tsunami killed some 500 people.

The State Department’s Humanitarian Assistance Unit jumped in to help by crafting a detailed and carefully annotated static map precisely describing the earthquake fault line as well as infrastructure that could help speed aid to Pangandaran.

Soon, when natural or manmade disasters strike, State will move from deploying a static map, while useful to some degree, to providing a more dynamic, electronic one that will feature real-time updates, officials said. The agency will launch an online version of its humanitarian geospatial products that will furnish aid organizations with information continually updated via links to federal databases.

State’s fledgling online geographic information system will automate its maps of earthquakes, genocide and other humanitarian disasters.

The new GIS comprises the use of information flowing in many cases from the intelligence community, a group of 16 spy agencies not known for their willingness to volunteer data to outside organizations.

Under the geospatial project, known as Visualized Information/Synthesized Temporal Analysis, State officials hope to weave together chronological, geographic, tabular and textual information in a convenient format, officials said.

The current stage of the project consists of producing static maps that draw together the various types of information—which in GIS, appear as layers of data. The VISTA upgrade will furnish an online product that humanitarian-relief planners can use to target their aid projects.

One State official, who requested anonymity, said the VISTA project “is in process right now. We are developing a prototype that will be a Web-based visualization and analysis tool.”

The official said that project designers expect to use an online visualization tool along the lines of those offered by ESRI of Redlands, Calif. He added that the VISTA project also likely would use government off-the-shelf software provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

“We expect to begin the development and design phase this month,” the official said. State plans to operate a prototype of the online version of VISTA from October to January 2007, the official said.

“It’s going to be database driven,” he added. “As you update the database, the visualizations will change.”

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