The “Charter Geographic Tool” was developed by the Charter member CNES (French National Centre for Space Studies) in order to establish a comprehensive record of all images acquired by the Charter members in response to Charter activations, as the international mechanism reports in its latest newsletter. Over and above the utility of such a record as an internal tool to the Charter, the main user requirement driving the development came from actors across the disaster management cycle to know where image data had been acquired during a given activation.
Since the creation of the International Charter „Space and Major Disasters? in 2000, images have been acquired by around 20 different Earth Observation satellites. Of this, over 4000 metadata files have been ingested in the catalogue by the Charter agencies.
The Charter Geographic Tool consists of three main components:
- An image metadata catalogue based on PostgreSQL
- A FTP site which manages the harvesting of the metadata files uploaded by the Charter agencies
- A web interface based on the mapshup framework. This user-friendly interface allows to search and browse the metadata catalogue by activation, date and hazard type.
The tool is accessible online: http://engine.mapshup.info/charterng/
