ESA service makes customised maps available to African a...( ESA has been working in partnership wit...),Health

ESA has been working in partnership with Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF) Belgium to remedy this. The result is the Medical Humanitarian Disaster Mapping Service (HUMAN). Since last year the service has been using satellite imagery to prepare on-demand maps of remote areas for humanitarian organisations. Now HUMAN has gone one better, enabling those organisations to make their own customised maps across most of Africa.

Arnold is an emergency officer at the MSF headquarters in Brussels. He recently received a call from the Congolese field team reporting new cholera cases near the city of Luebo. The immediate question is; Where is Luebo? There will soon be demands from the office, as he will have to inform his counterparts of the developing situation. But there is no detailed map of the Congo in the office library and it is too costly and too long to order a special reproduction of a new map when the team has no idea of the seriousness of the crisis. The need is for something quick and simple.

These issues are often faced by relief organisations and the pressure is to be fast and accurate. Off-line mapping services are expensive and do not have the response time required for simple fast delivery products.

HUMAN wanted to provide these organisations with a tool that could satisfy their needs. The tool should give aid workers fast, reliable access to geographical information. HUMAN has created a web portal that answers these needs by giving access to a complete mapping creation tool. The portal is available 24 hours a day and is accessible with a usual web browser.

What does the HUMAN web portal offer?

A geographical database of Africa between the tropics, with exceptional detail, is now accessible on-line.

As well as the classical functions of mapping navigation such as zooming in for detail or panning across a territory, the user is able to identify specific features such as roads, rivers, cities and airpo
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Contact: Mariangela D'Acunto
mariangela.d'acunto@esa.int
39-069-418-0856
European Space Agency
30-Nov-2004

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