Helping the UN Help Haiti Via GISCorps
Christopher G. Markuson, GISP, the GIS Manager of Pueblo County, Colorado took on another full time GIS job last month. He and Graham Smith, the Geomatics Coordinator from the Grand River Conservation Authority in Cambridge, Ontario are both working with the UN-SPIDER team in Bonn, Germany through GIS Corps. The goal: to help get the UN’s GIS up and running for Haiti and perhaps Chile.
The United Nations effort is starting from almost nothing in Haiti because the country had only one geographic information worker before the earthquake, in which she died. Many of the country’s electronic maps don’t show the names of roads or where hospitals are located.
Markuson and a team of nine other experts around the world have created the system and showed the agency what computer servers to buy to upgrade its abilities to deal with complicated mapping and other geographic information.
