Social Media Mapping: Unstructured Data Indexing & Geospatial Search

Harley Parks
Jerry Giles
Todd Hall
Will Yipp
Tim Gramp
PACOM PWC APAN, Pearl Harbor, HI

Real-Time Data Acquisition
Tuesday March 6, 2012 - 3:15 to 4:30 pm

All Partners Access Network (APAN) is a social media website (https://community.apan.org) for information sharing and collaboration between U.S. Military, U.S. Interagency, foreign military, international organizations (IOs), nongovernment organizations (NGOs), medical community, and civilian authorities. APAN augments the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) responsibility for the Department of Defense (DOD) Unclassified Information Sharing Service (UISS) in support of all Combatant Commands (COCOMs) and mission partners in the respective Area of Responsibility (AOR).

During the Haiti Earthquake Relief Efforts and International response to 2011 Japan Disaster, APAN demonstrates an open and secure network capability supporting critical humanitarian missions, exercises, and operations in need of collecting, storing, creating and distributing geospatial incident awareness and assessment information. APAN clients establish profiles, join online communities, write blogs, participate in forums, post/view media, schedule events, glean knowledge in wikis, and find information through multi-faceted search capability.

The APAN GIS provides the geographic context for users, groups, blogs, forums, media, calendars, wikis, and search engines. APAN's GIS strategy embraces security policies, harvest unstructured geographic data sources, utilize crowd sourcing, establish partnerships, and propose strategic directions while supporting daily operations. The geospatial applications range from venue planning, routing, capability profiles, resource distributions, event and staging locations, human impacts and response assessment, to real-time location updates. APAN's social media and GIS services use the internet and mobile technologies to leverage a unique opportunity to meet both Open Government and information security concerns.