Geographic Information Sciences Commons^™

Forming Community Partnerships, Lori Foley

CHAR

In the event of a disaster, regardless of the type or scope, the first response is always local. For the institutions and organizations charged with safeguarding the nation’s cultural and historic resources – museums, historical societies, libraries, and municipal offices, to name just a few – building relationships with local first responders and emergency managers before disaster strikes is key to ensuring the safety of staff and collections. State emergency management agencies are also collaborating with their state cultural agencies to protect these valuable and vulnerable resources. The resulting emergency networks better position the local community and the state to …

Lessons Learned From Culture In Crisis; Or Protecting The Past To Save The Future, Laurie Rush

CHAR

At the midpoint of the second decade of the 21^st century, the world is experiencing deliberate destruction of cultural property at a scale not seen since the Second World War. Future protection and preservation of cultural heritage depends on learning from tragedy and applying these lessons as pro-actively as possible. First, we are discovering that no matter the threat, there are people who risk their lives to save artifacts and features of their culture, and the motives for this courage are retrospectively clear. For a community to survive a conflict or disaster as a corporate entity, elements of shared …

Keynote Address - When Violent Nonstate Actors Target Cultural Heritage Sites, Victor Asal

CHAR

Why would organizations attack or kill people at cultural heritage sites or destroy such sites? Using data from the Big Allied and Dangerous insurgent dataset that has data on 140 insurgent organizations from 1998-2012, and data from the Global Terrorism Database, this presentation examines the factors that make insurgent groups more likely to attack such sites or kill people at such sites. We look at the impact of organizational ideology, organizational structure and power as well as country level factors.

Mitigation, Response And Recovery, Richard Lord

CHAR

Abstract: Hurricane Harvey ravaged Texas and Louisiana nearly five years after Superstorm Sandy devastated the East Coast and caused 53 deaths, destroyed or severely damaged 100,000 Long Island homes, and left an estimated $42 billion in damages across New York State.

This session will provide an overview of the disaster relief and assistance programs available under the Stafford Act, when they are triggered, and how private non-profit and cultural institutions can plan for natural hazards and take full advantage of available aid. There will also be discussion of the NYS Hazard Mitigation Plan, the Community Risk and Resiliency Act, and …

Informing Responders Using Gis And Gps, Deidre Mccarthy

CHAR

Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005 and created the single largest disaster for cultural resources that the United States has witnessed since the inception of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 1966. Notably, the NHPA created the National Register of Historic Places, our nation’s catalog of important cultural resources. The NHPA also stipulates that any federal undertaking which may adversely affect National Register eligible resources be mitigated. For the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Katrina created the largest compliance project ever under Section 106 of the NHPA.

Although causing a great deal of damage, Katrina also …

Keynote Address: Climate Change: From Global To New York Scale, Christopher D. Thorncroft

CHAR

This talk is concerned with the science and impacts of climate change from global to New York scales. It will provide an assessment of how the climate has changed over the past Century based on a purely observational perspective. The scientific basis for anthroprogenic climate change will be explained and discussed including a description of the “greenhouse effect” and why it is important for life on this planet. We will briefly discuss global and local consequences of a warmer climate and what we need to be prepared for going forward in the coming decades.

Opening Keynote Address: Using Data To Understand Cultural Destruction, Brian I. Daniels

CHAR

Brian I. Daniels, Ph.D, Penn Cultural Heritage Center, University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Why is cultural heritage targeted in conflict? Under what circumstances? By whom? Today, due in part to the recent notorious instances of cultural destruction in the Middle East and North Africa, there is perhaps more attention among the broader scientific community than ever before about the phenomenon of cultural loss. At the same time, there are many significant data and analytical gaps. Little social science literature about cultural destruction exists and many critical questions—and avenues of research—are, as of yet, unstudied. A primary reason for this lack …

The Development Of Japanese City's Future Simulation System: My City Forecast, Toshikazu Seto, Hiroshi Omata, Yuki Fukushima, Yoko Hasegawa, Midori Maeda, Yoshihide Sekimoto

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

In recent years, the optimization of urban management due to the rapid population decline has been one of the major issues in Japan. Future population estimation and related statistical information, such as the location information of the public facility is now available to open. However, open data utilization in the urban planning field is not advanced in comparison with other countries. We constructed the Web system using FOSS4G that citizens can be the future image of the city to operate on their own. It used mainly below FOSS4G tools; OpenLayers, PostGIS, Pgrouting and Geocolor. The collected data calculated in advance, …

The Billion Object Platform (Bop): A System To Lower Barriers To Support Big, Streaming, Spatio-Temporal Data Sources, Devika Kakkar, Ben Lewis, David Smiley, Ariel Nunez

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

With funding from the Sloan Foundation and Harvard Dataverse, the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) has developed a big spatio-temporal data visualization platform called the Billion Object Platform or "BOP". The goal of the project is to lower barriers for scholars who wish to access large, streaming, spatio-temporal datasets. Since once archived, streaming data gets big fast, and since most GIS systems don't support interactive visualization of millions of objects, a new platform was needed. The BOP is loaded with the latest billion geo-tweets and is fed a real-time stream of about 1 million tweets per day. The CGA …

An Iterative 3d Gis Analysis Of The Role Of Visibility In Ancient Maya Landscapes: A Case Study From Copan, Honduras, Heather Richards-Rissetto

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

For several decades, Geographic Information Systems (GISs) have held center stage in archaeological studies of ancient landscapes. Recently, three-dimensional (3D) technologies such as airborne LiDAR and aerial photogrammetry are allowing us to acquire inordinate amounts of georeferenced 3D data to locate, map, and visualize archaeological sites within their surrounding landscapes. GIS offers locational precision, data overlay, and complex spatial analysis. Three-dimensionality adds a ground-based perspective lacking in two-dimensional GIS maps to provide archaeologists a sense of mass and space more closely attuned with human perception. This article uses comparative and iterative approaches ‘tacking back and forth’ between GIS and 3D …