Crisis Mapping

Crisis mapping has emerged as a method of connecting and empowering citizens during emergencies. Maps are important because they have the ability to represent large amounts of information about a specific area of interest in a single frame and in a comprehensible manner. It is critical to share and understand complex spatial, thematic, and temporal information in a timely, visual, and compelling manner during a crisis response. During a crisis, crisis maps are frequently created and must be interpreted rapidly. They are special-purpose thematic maps on which objects, phenomena, or actions relevant to crisis management are highlighted using appropriate cartographic symbols and represented in order of importance. As practical tools in crisis response, maps are intuitive, informative, well-targeted, and topic-prominent, providing users with adequate visualization support for situation analysis, decision-making, and risk communication.

The damage caused by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti is well known. Ushahidi (Swahili for "witness"), a tech non-profit that focuses in producing free and open-source software for information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping, popularized crisis mapping in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Following the earthquake, Ushahidi launched a crisis map that allowed volunteer mappers from around the world, in various time zones, to begin plotting, merging, and mapping data gathered from a variety of sources, including social and mainstream media, as well as the affected community (via SMS/Internet), in order to display and visualize real-time reports on incidents, damages, and requests for assistance. OpenStreetMap, on the other hand, mapped out the Haitian catastrophe by crowdsourcing volunteer data gathered from satellite imagery and GPS surveys to create a detailed digital map of Haitian infrastructure, including roads, buildings, and camps. Various humanitarian agencies, including the World Bank, exploited the organization's aggregate data. Of course, as with every platform, each has its limitations. Still, Ushahidi has worked hard in recent years to improve the software and even released a hosted version called CrowdMap. Similarly, other tools such as MapBox have devoted considerable effort to developing easy-to-use mapping tools.

Online mapping that relies on volunteers with varying levels of expertise to analyze satellite photos has its drawbacks. As was the case in the immediate aftermath of the Philippines typhoon, the picture can be hazy or out of date. More than a third of the plot points in digital mapping used in the Philippines were found to be inaccurate in research.

Nuala Cowan, a geography professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., believes, "Accuracy will never be resolved." "How one interprets an image, how generic or specialized they are, can affect accuracy. It's a community of volunteers. Engineers did not create this. No one went out there and got those coordinates.”

According to Cowan, the mapping will continue to improve as software developers provide additional tools to prevent errors and more intelligent volunteers participate. She gives the example of Wikipedia. "Everyone believed Wikipedia was garbage when it first started," she recalls. Because more knowledgeable individuals are contributing, it's gotten a lot better." With OpenStreetMap, we're seeing the same thing. ”

CONCLUSION

While crisis mapping is a popular notion these days, it is quickly becoming a de facto competence in the industry. Although the lessons from crisis mapping are still being extracted, their increasing popularity has begun to provide us with a model for what other technologies we should embrace.

ICR360 developed a crisis mapping solution with real-time gathering, visualizing, and analysis of data during conflict and disaster settings to increase your team’s situational awareness. The torrent of information in today's confusing environment is daunting. ICR360 delivers clarity to key events at the speed of social media, allowing your team to do more under the most difficult conditions. This crisis mapping leverages the innate desires of people to share information during emergencies.?Join ICR360 as they launched an enhanced online community platform. This will help organizations and professionals in orchestrating and managing data, resources, communications, and tasks on a regular basis and build connections, where you can access your account anytime and anywhere.

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