LONDON (AlertNet) - In the chaos that usually follows a natural disaster, taking the time to create maps may seem low down on the priority list when a rapid response is key to helping to save lives.

But mapping and the humanitarian response meet when important questions are asked in the aftermath of a disaster, such as: "Where are the affected populations? Where can they be evacuated to? Where is it safe and where is the aid?"

"Crisis mapping is to the humanitarian space what x-rays are to public health," said Patrick Meier, who along with Jen Ziemke founded the International Network of Crisis Mappers (INCM).

"It helps us to understand at a micro level the behaviour we see in humanitarian emergencies," Meier told AlertNet in an interview.

Meier and Ziemke have joined forces to organise the first international conference on crisis mapping, to be held this week at John Carroll University in the United States.

Maps, aerial photography and satellite imagery already provide powerful tools for aid agencies to assess the scale of disasters and to keep tabs on the movement of affected people and supplies sent to help them.

Meier said a new approach to crisis mapping has evolved over the past five years with the aim of making the process more collaborative and more immediate.

A new generation of Web sites that allow users to exchange data and information and help create quasi real-time maps through mobile phone technology will be the way forward in crisis mapping, Meier said, just like Twitter and Facebook have become the standard in social networking over the past few years.

COLLABORATION IS KEY

This approach will allow a wider variety of actors to join forces in an emergency - such as survivors, donors, aid agencies and local media - to get their information onto maps in real time and distribute them rapidly among crises responders and beneficiaries.

"It is the view from below that we need," said Meier, adding crisis mapping could also make a difference to people-centred early warning systems by enabling local populations to share knowledge about their situation through maps.

Map-sharing portals such as Google Earth and open-source platforms, like Ushahidi, created to help collect witness reports of violence after the disputed 2008 elections in Kenya, have been at the forefront of innovative efforts to visualise conflicts.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google broke new ground in 2007 with their "Crisis in Darfur" package of electronic maps and other data, utilising high-resolution satellite imagery to display graphic evidence of human rights violations in Darfur.

Conference co-organiser Ziemke used crisis maps and econometric techniques to help identify patterns of civil war abuse in Angola. After coding and geo-referencing 41 years of conflict data in that country, she powerfully demonstrated how losses on the battlefield escalate patterns of violence against civilians.

HOW MAPS CAN HELP SAVE LIVES

On the ground, MapAction, a small British-based NGO that provides mapping and other geospatial information following natural disasters, is a veteran in using maps to help emergency responders.

One of its teams arrived in Sumatra three days after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the city of Padang and its surrounding areas last month, and offers to contribute data to its maps came in rapidly.

"There have been many offers of data and requests for maps. I have not experienced this much frantic activity since the Kashmir earthquake in 2005," said team leader Nigel Woof.

In the Philippines, where the worst floods in 40 years have wreaked havoc, MapAction has created maps with the help of OpenStreetMap, a free Wikipedia-style map.

Meier hopes the Crisis Mapping 2009 conference this week in Cleveland, Ohio, which brings together mapping experts, software developers and humanitarian crises responders from around the world, will go a long way in helping to create effective real-time tracking systems.

"Technology is no barrier any more to this," said Meier. "It's a matter of integrating the different aspects and updating in quasi real-time so that anyone in a 100-mile radius of a disaster can be reached."

The "Humanitarian Sensor Web" (HSW), a tool which allows community leaders and crisis responders to coordinate their efforts in emergency humanitarian situations, will be shown publicly for the first time at the Oct. 16-18 conference, which is co-organised by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and John Carroll University.

The HSW also aims to serve as a source of collective intelligence, with a map-based database of places and events that will help those who are responding to a current crisis or planning for future security or humanitarian relief, Meier said.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation will later this year launch its Emergency Information Service (EIS) which deploys in emergencies to help those affected by natural disasters get the information they need to survive and recover.

The EIS will also be based on a collaborative platform that will allow users to share information.

Researchers have used maps to visualise crises for many years.

But there are drawbacks in the the use of highly-sophisticated, computerised Geographical Information Systems (GIS), which are usually used in such work -- not least that they are expensive and difficult to operate.

Nor do these systems allow for much integration and collaboration, and due to their complexities they are not usually updated in real time.

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