OpenEyes99:
Remote-Sensing Operations in Humanitarian Emergencies

Thursday and Friday, April 15-16, 1999

United States Institute of Peace, 1200 17th St. NW,
2nd Floor Conference Room
1200 17th Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20036-3011

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

This workshop was a follow-up to the Managing Communications conference held in 1996 the Managing Information Chaos seminar held in March, 1999, and a workshop hosted by the Institute, but sponsored by the UN Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs on data sharing between UN organizations April 13 and 14, 1999.

Participants in the OpenEyes workshop tried to:

• Chart the current state-of-the-art in the application of remote-sensing and GIS technologies in humanitarian operations
• Focus on identifying existing resources, expertise and current practices in data acquisition, sharing and exchange and coordination
• Broach the development of data standards related to humanitarian operations.

Presenters included practitioners from national governments, UN and other international agencies, non-governmental organization and private industry.

Participants found that the promise of emerging remote-sensing and GIS tools and platforms has not yet been fulfilled as a result of operational and cultural challenges.

Restricted data availability, limited data standards, high costs, few practical models, lack of organizational relationships among users, and, the mismatch between the effort required to extract useful information from data derived from commercial satellite imagery and the operational exigencies (and pace) of humanitarian response on the ground, all combine to make satellite imagery of limited use, at best.

With respect to the presentations and discussions over the week of April 12-16 (which included a meeting of operational UN agencies to discuss coordination issues related to the exchange of structured data), workshop participants made the following recommendations on what "next steps" need to be taken to enhance data collection, processing and dissemination during humanitarian emergencies.

Kosovo Case Study

• What were the lessons learned?
• What were the practitioners looking for?
• What did they produce?
• How much did it cost?

Presenters:

• Einar Bjorgo, Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, Norway
• Jean-Yves Bouchardy, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Switzerland
• John Pike, Federation of American Scientists
• David Smith, Office of the Geographer and Global Issues, U.S. Department of State
• Nate Smith, U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, Agency for International Development

Data Standards
Despite basic technical standards for file formats, transport and storage for imaging and GIS attributes, there is little standardization on the content of humanitarian data: activities, population, logistics, operations.

• What standards currently exist?
• How are organizations operating in the absence of international standards?
• What recourse could this community establish or use to define useful data standards?

Presenters:

• Dennis King, UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, ReliefWeb
• Maxx Dilley, U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, Agency for International Development
• Cliff Kottman, OpenGIS Consortium

Issues that were addressed in these sessions included:

• How can funders and businesses could more effectively assist UN/NGO efforts;
• What kind of arrangements (prices/licenses/sharing) on data could be developed to facilitate the use of remote-sensing and GIS technologies
• How can response delays be minimizedon the part of vendors and other agencies?
• What kinds of data products are available, covering what regions, at what time(s), and how much do they cost?
• What networks of expertise exist and how they can be mobilized?
• What are the best channels and techniques available to get access to government maps and data?

For More Information

To learn more about the work of the Virtual Diplomacy Initiative, please contact Virtual Diplomacy director Sheryl Brown.