The First International Crisis Mapping Conference – ACLED Demo

16 October 2009

We’re excited to be at the first International Crisis Mapping Conference in Cleveland, OH for the weekend.

While at ICCM2009, we’ll be discussing some of our work with ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset). The ACLED project was founded by Dr. Clionadh Raleigh and team members from the PRIO Centre for the Study of Civil War, who set out to create a conflict database that would help answer researchers’ questions. ACLED was subsequently funded by the World Bank with the aim of better understanding events in client states.

This video gives a brief overview of how SpatialKey is being used to investigate the relationship between this data and the location of refugee camps and environmental factors. What’s significant is that SpatialKey is making it easier for ACLED researchers to collaboratively bring together vast amounts of information from a wide variety of sources in a meaningful way – all without having to involve programmers or GIS experts to get their work done.

A recent Reuters article about trends in crisis mapping highlights the very issue SpatialKey is helping researchers solve:

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.

For more details on our work with ACLED, read the ACLED crisis mapping case study.