Professors help relief efforts by mapping crises and conflicts

Chronicle of Higher Education : Thanks to web-based tools, one can collect scattered observations and measurements from people living in regions hit by earthquakes, civil wars, and other crises. Other software, known as geographical information systems, can map those measurements and correlate them with other geographically indexed information. The result, as the Chronicle‘s Marc Parry reports, is that GIS-savvy professors from around the world are teaming up in volunteer networks to produce accurate, current maps of working payphones, blocked roads, and other useful information. The combination of local observations and GIS is proving helpful in the wake of this year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan and in the ongoing civil war in Libya.