Analyzing conflicts via maps is not new. For centuries generals and politicians have moved pushpins on maps to help guide troop movements, understand enemy positions, or help avert conflict altogether. What’s new to conflict and crisis mapping are the tools now allowing military, politicians, and humanitarian groups better understand what drives political instability and violent conflict, and better address it.

One of the more rewarding uses of SpatialKey has been driven by a team led by Dr Clionadh Raleigh. Dr Raleigh and team members from the PRIO Center for the Study of Civil War created the ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) database. The ACLED project team’s objective was to provide a better read of conflicts by understanding the relationships between combatants, social groups, economies, and even natural phenomena such as droughts or floods. Ultimately their goal is to achieve a more stable, just, and peaceful world.

Crisis mapping

Thanks in part to funding from the World Bank, ACLED provides up-to-date, immediately accessible analytics and maps for over 50 countries in the developing world to help academics, the World Bank, NGOs, aid agencies and more gain insights on civil war dynamics. The database includes for example the date and location of conflict events, event types, rebel and other groups involved, as well as specifics on battles, killings, riots, and recruitment activities by rebels, governments, militias, armed groups, protesters and civilians, and much more.

The difficulty of creating a central database for crisis mapping is that it needs to bring together vast amounts of diverse information coming from a wide variety of sources. In technical terms: a data mess. Since neither Dr Raleigh nor the users of the ACLED database are trained GIS (Geographic Information System) professionals, they decided to use SpatialKey to centralize and analyze the data. SpatialKey is web-based and does not require special training or programming. All users need is an internet connection to immediately create highly visual maps and reports.

The benefit of using SpatialKey is that each agency using ACLED data can now create maps to help answer totally different questions, no data specialists required. Some groups need to better understand how to mitigate conflict in a specific area, others want to find the safest zone to place a refugee camp, and yet others want to understand the impact of possible floods and droughts on a conflict so they can arrange their resources accordingly.

This has allowed researchers to analyze data with more precision, as well as create a more collaborative environment to help the researcher community create predictive models of civil war. It has also helped challenge assumptions. For example Dr Raleigh says that many people considered civil wars to be primarily rural events, but SpatialKey has showed that these conflicts tend to happen close to larger cities, as rebel groups attempt to engage with the military. She considers that the combination of ACLED and SpatialKey goes a long way toward advancing the field- it provides the next generation in conflict analysis and crisis mapping.

If you cannot attend Doug’s session, please read our case study on the use of SpatialKey by ACLED.

For more information on SpatialKey, or to start your free trial, please go to spatialkey.com.

That’s the business SpatialKey is in. We’re allowing people who in the past may not have been on the front lines of data analysis to take their spreadsheets, CRM data, salesforce.com data and more, map it, analyze it via simple click and drag tools, and extract meaning from it. Our goal is to help people -regular business people, not just data specialists- ask questions of their data, understand trends, and make better decisions, faster.

Police report

The great advantage of working at SpatialKey is that our clients come from such a diverse variety of organizations- each with totally different problems to address, and data analysis needs. We’re helping agencies better understand war zones and address conflict, allowing pharmaceutical companies analyze vaccine distribution efficiencies, or sales departments gain deeper insights into their sales funnel. Our partner Social Compact and the Citi Foundation recently launched a new service based on SpatialKey to help drive investments to undeserved communities. We’re even helping police departments get more bad guys off the streets by allowing them to better understand and address crime patters. The list goes on. Right now for example,  I’m working on a case study with a client in the energy sector. They are a publicly traded company that buys excess electricity from schools, businesses, etc and sells it back to utilities or grid operators when energy use spikes. In their case, they use SpatialKey to better monitor and analyze energy capacity and therefore more quickly respond to energy need changes. SpatialKey provides them insight that they could only dream of in the past. All that with no programming, nor expensive hardware, training or software investment.

Marketing team report

The common thread among all our clients is that they have tons of data, most of it coming from a variety of sources. They know that they could do a better job putting the pieces of the puzzle together to make better decisions, but they don’t have the energy nor budget to invest in complicated tools. Each one of our clients were amazed when they saw their first demo of SpatialKey. They suddenly saw their data like never before and could not believe such a simple solution had so much power. The power they needed to drill down into their data and make better decisions.

Crisis mapping

The other thread we’re seeing is that once SpatialKey is used within an organization, it does not take long for others within the same company to want to start using it too. Take the example of our energy client. They immediately saw that they could use SpatialKey to track not only kilowatts, but also leads, prospects and more.

Our engineering team is hard at work developing new functionalities into SpatialKey. We all know that the future is about more data, not less, so we want to provide the tools needed to allow our users to see the pins in the haystack that will help guide their decisions. Looking forward to seeing what other client uses are coming our way. Want to find out more? Go to Spatialkey.com or contact us.

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.