Refugee camps almost by definition have limited visibility. Often located in places that are hot, flooded, or at war, such camps go unseen by most of the world except for the occasional crisis segment on the evening news. Now, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) hopes to give more visibility to the work that it does in such camps around the world, bringing the reality of refugee life into the laptops and living rooms of web surfers thanks to the power of Google mapping tools.

Google and the UNHCR talked up a partnership in which Google provides the pro version of its Google Earth software, its Sketchup 3D software for creating objects and structures, and extensive documentation on how to use the system to create a .KML layer. The result is a (hopefully) informative overlay that works with both Google Earth and Google Maps to tell visual stories.

The UNHCR overlay has three levels of detail, moving from the big picture to the birds-eye. The first layer provides a UNHCR tour and shows the group's work in major operations in Darfur/Chad, Iraq, and Colombia. The second layer illustrates the refugee experience and links to specific camps. The third and most "macroscopic" layer shows an individual camp layout, complete with water storage bladders (see picture below).

UNHCR staffers waxed eloquent about how the power of easy-to-use mapping can aid their work. "In the deserts and jungles where humanitarian operations take place, access to maps and web resources such as Google Earth will become as normal for our operations' managers as using a compass or a satellite phone," said Karl Steinacker, who heads the UNHCR Field Information & Coordination Support Section.

But the project seems most likely to revolutionize refugee work, if it does so at all, by graphically illustrating the location and realities of the camps to populations that have little firsthand experience of UNHCR's work. Francoise Jaccoud, a public information officer at UNHCR, summed up this possibility when he said, "The impact of Google Earth is limited only by our imagination and it can, indeed, dramatically reduce the distance between refugees and the public."

UNHCR isn't the only agency using Google Earth to foster awareness of serious problems. Just yesterday, Michael Graham of the Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative at the US Holocaust Museum launched a new layer called "World is Witness" that will be used as a "geoblog." The layer will be updated with posts about places in countries like Rwanda and the Congo, showing people's stories using the power of maps and photos.

As for Google, it's trying to get its tools in the hand of more aid agencies and humanitarian groups, confident that the power of this new way of telling stories will prove a good fit with groups looking to highlight global issues in lesser-known places. But creating and maintaining the mapping data isn't a simple matter, as a Google blog post today makes clear. In a lengthy but fascinating entry, Google's Andrew McLaughlin described just how complicated it is for Google to do something as seemingly simple as determine names for every body of water used in its maps. What to do, for instance, when a patch of water is called "Sea of Japan" in one country (guess which one) and "East Sea" in another?

Google certainly has an incredible resource on its hands. Microsoft, despite the presence of slick features like the scarily-sharp "bird's eye" view on its Live Search Maps, stands to lose out on being the de facto source for mapping overlays if Google continues to gain mindshare, though Microsoft did introduce rudimentary support for .KML overlays late last year. If it hopes to prevent Google from becoming the YouTube of mapping, it may need to act even more quickly.