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State HIU

State HIU

U.S. Department of State, Humanitarian Information Unit

@StateHIU | https://hiu.state.gov | https://data.hdx.rwlabs.org/organization/us-state-hiu

Mission

The mission of the Humanitarian Information Unit (HIU) is to serve as a U.S. Government interagency center to identify, collect, analyze, and disseminate all-source information critical to U.S. Government decision-makers and partners in preparation for and response to humanitarian emergencies worldwide, and to promote innovative technologies and best practices for humanitarian information management.

To accomplish this mission, the HIU performs the following tasks:

Science and Technology Programs

CyberGIS

The Humanitarian Information Unit has been developing a sophisticated geographic computing infrastructure referred to as the CyberGIS. The CyberGIS provides highly available, scalable, reliable, and timely geospatial services capable of supporting multiple concurrent projects. The CyberGIS relies on primarily open source projects, such as PostGIS, GeoServer, GDAL, GeoGig, OGR, and OpenLayers. The name CyberGIS is dervied from the term geospatial cyberinfrastructure.

ROGUE

The Rapid Opensource Geospatial User-Driven Enterprise (ROGUE) Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration (JCTD) is a two-year research & development project developing the technology for distributed geographic data creation and synchronization in a disconnected environement. This new technology taken altogether is referred to as GeoSHAPE. See http://geoshape.org for more information. HIU is leveraging the technology developed through ROGUE to build out the CyberGIS into a robust globally distributed infrastructure.

MapGive

MapGive, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Humanitarian Information Unit, makes it easy for new volunteers to learn to map and get involved in online tasks.

http://mapgive.state.gov

Imagery to the Crowd

The Imagery to the Crowd Initiative (ITTC) is a core initiative of the Humanitarian Information Unit. Through ITTC, HIU publishes high-resolution commercial satellite imagery, licensed by the United States Government, in a web-based format that can be easily mapped by volunteers. These imagery services are used by volunteers to add baseline geographic data into OpenStreetMap, such as roads and buildings. The imagery processing pipeline is built from opensource applications, such as TileCache and GeoServer. All tools developed by HIU for ITTC are open source.

http://mapgive.state.gov/ittc

Secondary Cities

Mapping Secondary Cities for Resiliency, Human Security, and Emergency Preparedness is the flagship, field-based initiative of the Office of the Geographer.

http://secondarycities.state.gov

Websites

State GeoNode

Primary open geographic data platform of the U.S. Department of State. The State GeoNode is a digital service provided by the U.S. Department of State for publishing open geographic data produced by or compiled by the U.S. Government to the public, U.S. Government decision-makers, and partners on complex emergencies, natural disasters, and diplomatic activities world-wide.

http://geonode.state.gov

Ebola GeoNode

This is a partnership platform for sharing geospatial data, analysis and maps related to the Ebola emergency response. The platform is intended to minimize the time that GIS analysts spend locating up-to-date data. Users are able to make maps on the fly, view metadata, and access the reports behind GIS layers. Curators are working to ensure that the layers are recent, clean, useful, and legally and technically open.

http://ebolageonode.org

Cusco GeoNode

The Cusco GeoNode is a geospatial platform provided by the U.S. Department of State, Humanitarian Information Unit as part of the Secondary Cities project. The Cusco GeoNode is used for collaborating on and sharing geospatial data among the US Government and partners in Peru. Learn more on the about page.

http://cuscogeonode.state.gov

Key Repos

CyberGIS

CyberGIS Guides - Guides for enterprise deployment of open source Web GIS systems

CyberGIS Client - Client side code for CyberGIS (abstraction layer for OpenLayers, OL3, and Leaflet). Includes source code and examples.

CyberGIS Scripts - Scripts used in the CyberGIS

CyberGIS OSM Mappings - Mappings from OSM Key-Value structure to table/shapefile schema. Used in GeoGig and GeoSHAPE.

CyberGIS Commons - This repository contains a set of Java classes and methods commonly used in the CyberGIS.

MapGive/Imagery to the Crowd

Mapgive - Source code for MapGive website

ittc-fabric - Fabric scripts for doing automated tasks with ITTC infrastructure.

ittc-server-django - TileJet based server for in-memory caching of tiles