Facebook develops «disaster maps» to help in humanitarian catastrophes

Facebook has developed «disaster maps» to facilitate its work of humanitarian organizations in places where there has been a natural catastrophe.The social network wants to make its information available to these groups to identify most affected areas, depending on the activity of its users.With this service, Facebook intends to cover the usual failures of traditional communication channels that occur in the first minutes after disasters.Thanks to the «disaster map» resources such as water, food or medical supplies can be identified, that are essential when a catastrophe occurs, according to the social network.

Organizations that have collaborated with Facebook for the implementation This service has been UNICEF, the International Federation of the Red Cross, the Red Crescent or the World Food Program , among others.All of them have participated in the development of this new function by selecting the data that will be most useful and fixing how these will be used once the disaster occurs. "It is an example of how technology can help people to be more secure" , have stood out from Facebook.

The opinion of these organizations has allowed to establish several types of maps that will include information about locations that Facebook users have chosen to share on the social network.

Among these types of maps is a location density map, which shows where people are located before, during and after the natural disaster. This information may be compared with other historical data, such as population estimates based on satellite images, to support humanitarian and emergency groups in understanding queareas have been most affected by the catastrophe.

facebook safety check

A second type of map is motion maps , which collect the patterns of displacement between neighborhoods and cities over a certain period of several hours.Thanks to this data, organizations can better identify where more resources will be necessary, better define evacuation routes or predict where there will be major traffic problems.

Facebook will also take advantage of this 'Safety Check' function for this new service, through which users in the affected area can inform their contacts that they are well.Thanks to this service, the social network can define in which areas there are more or less people safe, which will help the groups to locate the places where more help is needed.

big data and solidarity

This Facebook initiative is not launica, much less, that makes use of the data for solidarity and the common good.As I explain in Nobbot the expert Jesus Guijarro, techniques related to Big Data are already used in initiatives such as carried out by the American Carter Center Foundation together with Palantir, which processed more than 3000 videos on YouTube along with government reports to map the bombings that had taken place Syria.

Also Doctors Without Borders and Red Cross have worked with Openstreetmap, a participatory mapping service, and about 240 scientific data volunteers to represent regions and large cities potentially affected by the Ebola virus an epidemic over which is also the Boston Children's Hospital to develop the Healthmap platform that allows mapping the geographical evolution of the disease.

In another research project in which they have collaborated United Nations and BBVA Data&Analytics , are promoting development initiatives analyzing financial operations data to understand how people behave before and after natural catastrophes.