Emergencies that require external humanitarian intervention typically occur in resource-poor countries where reliable information on logistical resources is very limited and the operational capacity to respond is weak or non-existent. In such circumstances, Information Management (IM) and Geographic Information (GI) units within many humanitarian agencies strive to collect, analyse and distribute relevant operational information, providing vital decision support to responders. However there is currently, in the humanitarian field, no standardized semantic definition of even the most common geographic features relevant to field operations, nor are there established data collection standards to ensure that newly acquired data can be processed and integrated quickly into structured databases. This leads to duplicated data collection efforts and, in the context of emergencies, ill-affordable data processing work when any two data sets are exchanged or integrated.

In 2000, the UN Geographic Information Working Group (www.ungiwg.org) was established to strengthen collaborative work between Geographic Information units throughout the United Nations and of standardizing UN GI protocols. During its 6th annual plenary, held in Addis Ababa in October 2005, it was proposed that UNGIWG member organizations should work towards developing a UN Spatial Data Infrastructure (UNSDI) comprising data and metadata standards, data-sharing mechanisms and inter-operable geographic data repositories. In the context of this wider effort, the United Nations Joint Logistics Centre (UNJLC), a Humanitarian Common Services aimed at facilitating logistics coordination in complex emergencies, was tasked with developing a spatial data model for transport-related datasets.

The project, baptised UNSDIT, lead to (i) the design of a global transport and logistics geo-database schema tailored to humanitarian requirements, (ii) a data collection and processing methodology, (iii) the development of an online repository for storing and serving logistics data. Four broad issues are being addressed towards these objectives:

1. Semantics and terminology -information requirements of humanitarian logistics
2. Technical implementation -database modelling of transport and logistics features; and implementaiton of an online UNSDIT GIS repository.
3. Integration of the UNSDIT package in UNJLC and partners deployments
4.  Institutional adoption -generation of a critical mass of users and implementers

Version 2.0 of the UNSDI-T model was published in June 2008 building from a year and a half of user input. Many thanks to all who have contributed their comments. This version is available in this website in a number of formats including an html file for easy navigation through the structure, Excel workbooks, an XML schema, a UML model (Visio), graphic representation of the structure diagrams (PDF) as well as as database templates (ESRI Personal Geodatabase and Shapefile).

If you wish to be kept informed of the progress on this project, or if you would like to contribute your ideas and feedback, please join the UNSDI-T mailing list by sending an email to unsdi-t-subscribe@unjlc.org

For further information on this project, or if you would like to contribute more directly, please email to maps@unjlc.org or by subscribing to the unsdi-t mailling list (see above).

The UNSDI-T development process is benefiting from our partnership with ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action -www.ithacaweb.org), who have been of great help implementing our logistics information requirements into the current structure. The resulting UNSDIT schema has been implemented as the transportation specification of the WFP SDI the WFP, UNJLC and ITHACA joint effort to the building of the UNSDI