Starting point
Organizations with sites, travelers, or suppliers abroad need to know quickly whether an earthquake, an armed conflict, a major fire, or a disease outbreak affects them. The information is scattered: travel advisories from several foreign ministries, earthquake and weather services, satellite fire data, health authorities, and the ongoing news. Each source has its own format, its own rhythm, and its own way of saying where something happened — sometimes a coordinate, sometimes a country, sometimes a weather zone.
The consultancy wanted to show its clients this situation in one place — as part of its existing software suite, not as yet another tool with its own login. The situation picture was to use the same accounts, organizations, and roles as the other modules and keep each organization's data strictly apart from everyone else's.
On top of that came a condition that is often underestimated: because the situation picture is offered commercially, only sources whose terms explicitly allow that could be used. “Freely available online” does not mean “free for commercial use” — and some providers license the same dataset differently in different places.
Solution
We built a situation picture that automatically collects events from open sources, places them on the map, grades their severity, and shows them on an interactive 3D globe or a world map — with a chronological feed, a detail card, and country pages. Every event is linked to the official travel and safety advisories of its country, complemented by sanctions regimes and displacement figures. The event feed is the same for everyone; sites, saved views, and alert rules belong to each organization or person alone.
Much of the work went into data quality. When a source delivers only coordinates, a built-in land grid determines the country — so a wildfire in the Amazon is attributed to Brazil, not to the ocean. A news report becomes a conflict only when a named armed party is involved and at least two different outlets report it. And if a source fails or comes back empty, its last state stays in place instead of a whole layer silently disappearing.
Each source was added only after its terms of use had been reviewed — those of the specific channel as well as the provider's general ones. Several well-known sources were deliberately left out as a result. The WHO's outbreak news, for example, is missing because its terms restrict commercial use; disease outbreaks come from the US CDC and the European ECDC instead. The source credits travel automatically into every report and every export.
- Conflicts, natural hazards, protests, and disease outbreaks, updated as often as every 15 minutes
- Travel advisories from the German Federal Foreign Office, the US State Department, and the UK Foreign Office for every country
- Country situation index with levels, and a flag when a country deviates unusually from its own normal
- Own sites by import, geocoded automatically, with the distance to every event
- Alert rules in the app, instantly by e-mail, or as a daily digest — at most six instant e-mails in 24 hours, the rest arrives bundled
- Reference layers with straits, ports, and nuclear power plants: when an event is near a strait, the detail card names what lies within reach — descriptively, without claiming consequences the data cannot support
- Situation brief at the push of a button: as text, print version with a map, GeoJSON, and CSV
- Look back at any of the last 30 days, with the travel advisories valid at the time
- Source status at a glance: if a source fails, its last state stays visible and the outage is shown
Results
Three examples show what this means in day-to-day work: if an earthquake strikes near a plant, the report moves up when events are sorted by the organization's own sites, with the straight-line distance — and anyone with an alert rule for the sites' surroundings gets an e-mail linking straight to the report. If a country that employees travel to rises to a higher level in the situation index, a level rule reports it. And for the situation briefing, the crisis team prints a country's situation brief: with a map, reports, travel advisories, and source credits.
The consultancy has extended its suite with a global situation picture that fits in seamlessly: the same account, the same organizations and roles, the same look and feel. Instead of following a dozen sources one by one, its clients' teams can follow the situation in one place. We deliver maintenance and ongoing development continuously from a single source.
- One situation picture instead of a dozen separate sources
- Alerts as soon as an event affects the organization's own sites
- Commercially usable: only license-checked sources, with source credits in every export
- No extra account: sign-in, roles, and tenants from the existing suite