In a previous post we commented the gradual increase in use of gvSIG in sphere of civil protection and emergency management. In the moment of publication of symbols library “Emergency”, we received information from two diferent sites about existence of a set of symbols that would be interesting to include in gvSIG.

It is the set of symbols created by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) with humanitarian goals aiming help workers and volunteers show and interpret information about emergencies and crisis quickly and easily.

When a disaster is on, it’s essential that all diferent humanitarian organisms and workers can get accurate information about needs of people affected and locations and resources available to help them. This set of symbols is, in a way, the standard of symbology of emergencies.

As said came to us information in two different ways, one of them an organism of civil protection which told us that had to pay to include these symbols in a corporative GIS which name I don’t want to say and, by the way, we talked how it would be important and useful these symbols were in gvSIG. As said.

We generated the library, including the symbols with white window and color window, generating several subfolders, first by usual colors (white, blue, green and purple) and second by thematics. In final, we improved what this organism had to pay to have this set of icons available in a private GIS, and seems that (also in this cases) money is over everything.

Hundred of symbols that thanks to these new tools gvSIG 2.0 brings, we included in a few minutes in our gvSIG.

We completed the library, as usual, with many line and polygonal symbols that can be useful to show seriousness of an specific phenomenon add inspirated in different maps created by humanitarian organisms.

This package is available in add-ons manager (selecting URL http://downloads.gvsig.org/download/gvsig-desktop/ and searching for “Types/symbols”) or directly downloading the package here.

We hope that this new library be useful and, surely, it don’t need to be used many times.