Launch of UNHCR Map portal

Building on the work realized for MSF, we have supported the FICSS section of UNHCR in developping their own Map Portal, which has just been released after several months of piloting.

CartONG is supporting the FICSS section of UNHCR for almost 6 years now, through GIS trainings and technical backstopping (roll-out with ArcGIS and ArcGIS server). The UNHCR Visualisation and Mapping Team has worked with a GeoNetwork in order to store their maps created either by field GIS Officers either the HQ Team.

They have been interested by our first experience of developing a Map Centre for MSF working with the same technology. That is why they have requested us, based on the open-source code used for MSF, to build a similar Map Portal. This Map Portal has been developed with GeoNetwork for the backend, and Bootstrap & Symfony for the front-end. The added-value of this application is the request form and the request management tool which allows to centralize the requests and plan the follow up.

2,490 static maps are already stored on this library. The simple filter system and the dynamic map on the landing page allow to search by country. 2 public webservices are available and in a near future webmaps will also be accessible through this platform. It is public and available to everyone.

The link to the Map portal: http://maps.unhcr.org

This is the first version of the UNHCR Map Portal. Further developments and improvements will be done in a probable next version.