GIS 2.0 and Humanitarian Information Management Lecture

Today I gave a guest lecture to the Prof. Stephen Egbert and Prof. Shannon O’Lear ‘s ‘Geography and Genocide’ class (Geography 571) at the University of Kansas. Students in this class come from a range of backgrounds, so the content was designed as an introduction to GIScience and it’s potential applications. This included a brief review of GIS 2.0 concepts, and moved on to show how these tools are being utilized in humanitarian applications.

It is always interesting to introduce people to these technologies. The Open Street Map – Project Haiti video just blows people away. I like to show it first as an indication of what GIS 2.0 is all about — open source GIS software combined with inexpensive, powerful hardware is allowing people to interact, produce, and consume geographic data in amazing ways. Back this up with a review of Ushahidi-Haiti, the role of Twitter in Iran, and the utility of virtual globes loaded with high-resolution satellite imagery in Darfur, and you see the lights go on.

OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

This lecture also gave me the opportunity to review some the KML datasets I have been working on for the Humanitarian Information Unit regarding Darfur and DRC. While there is nothing earth-shattering about mapping point data in KML, utilizing the time component and animation capability in Google Earth does begin to translate a dataset into a story (or geo-narrative as Madden and Ross call it). I’ll make these available as soon as possible.

The PowerPoint presentation can be downloaded here (23MB).