Culture Under Threat Smart M.App Powered by Incident Analyzer
June 3, 2016
Culture Under Threat Smart M.App Powered by Incident Analyzer
BY DANNY KITA ON JUNE 3, 2016 HEXAGON SMART M.APP
The Antiquities Coalition, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is a non-governmental organization working to stop the looting and trafficking of antiquities. They unite professionals from diverse backgrounds to join in the fight against cultural racketeering. Cultural Racketeering is the systematic theft of art and antiquities by organized criminal syndicates. Stolen antiquities generating illicit funds are being used to fund global terror campaigns.
Such a noble cause is reminiscent of the Monuments Men of World War II, who were credited with protecting and recovering many of the cultural treasures of Europe from collateral damage. Unfortunately in today’s situation, recovery is not an option.
As a means to combat the wanton destruction of historic sites, the Antiquities Coalition partnered with Hexagon to create the Culture Under Threat Smart M.App to categorize and illustrate the losses. The intent is to call attention to the destruction wrought by Daesh, also known as ISIS, and other extremist organizations. This interactive Smart M.App-driven solution identifies and offers insight into the destruction of heritage sites in the Middle East and North Africa.
This dynamic information service, delivered through a Hexagon Smart M.App, provides a new way to visualize the campaign of destruction that ISIS and other extremist organizations have unleashed across the Middle East and North Africa. The Culture Under Threat Smart M.App temporally illustrates antiquity destruction to date with easy to use time and date slide bars showing when such incidents took place.
The ability to view this timeline with any combination of data sets allows for a unique examination of patterns. This allows experts to not only quantify data across a wide region, but provides an opportunity to understand the types of patterns that are occurring and that can better inform them for developing solutions to the critical threats caused by the destruction.
The destruction in the countries identified by the Culture Under Threat Smart M.App reveals many sites that have been deliberately targeted or destroyed. Destroyed heritage includes significant monuments from the ancient, Greco-Roman, Islamic, and modern periods alike. Pictures of the damage can be taken and uploaded to the Culture Under Threat Smart M.App so it becomes an active information exchange and visualization tool.
The engine behind the Culture Under Threat Smart M.App is the Incident Analyzer Smart M.App. Incident Analyzer has a wide range of applications in which it can be deployed to provide insightful analysis on frequency, clustering, and temporal or spatial patterns for any incidents whether they represent cultural sites as in the Culture Under Threat Smart M.App highlighted in this article, or any of a number of other incidents or events. It can be used by public safety organizations to analyze crime statistics and gain insight into crime spikes; transportation organizations will find it extremely valuable in analyzing accident data; infrastructure uses include monitoring power outage and subsequent response times to provide a thorough understanding of emergency response effectiveness. It can also be used to track emergency response and provides the ability to perform detailed analysis; health organizations can use it to identify and track the spread of worrisome disease and illnesses, government uses include analyzing a wide range of events and also enabling sharing the analysis with local citizens for full transparency in support of smart city initiatives, and many other commercial uses.
Please visit our web site http://go.hexagongeospatial.com/incident-analysis to learn more about Incident Analyzer, one of the new Smart M.Apps – the M.App of the future!
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