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The Chinese GIS vendor SuperMap has received a letter of appreciation from the National Geomatics Centre of China for providing free software and technical services as part of the Sichuan earthquake relief effort.

When an 8.0 magnitude earthquake jolted southwest China’s Sichuan province on 12 May, the state council responded by mobilising large numbers of civil and military assets to help mitigate its effects.

NGCC contingency plans called for it to provide maps of the area to assist in orchestrating this mobilisation. However, the scale of the disaster overwhelmed NGCC resouces.

SuperMap was one of a number of vendors with operations in China that responded to calls for more software and staff to run it.

The local branches of Intergraph Corporation and ESRI also both contributed volunteers and software.

NGCC created a GIS of the earthquake zone, which was extensively used, for instance, to identify areas with high risk of further landslides. It is currently being used to mastermind reconstruction work.

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