Live Universal Awareness Map, commonly known as Liveuamap, is an internet service to monitor and indicate activities on online geographic maps, particularly of locations with ongoing armed conflicts. It was developed by the Ukrainian software engineers from

Dnipro Dnipro, previously called Dnipropetrovsk from 1926 until May 2016, is Ukraine's fourth-largest city, with about one million inhabitants. It is located in the eastern part of Ukraine, southeast of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on the Dnieper Rive ...

Rodion Rozhkovskiy and Oleksandr Bilchenko.

Creation and name

The two founders of Liveuamap, Rodion Rozhkovskiy and Oleksandr Bilchenko, initially experimented independently with algorithms to filter and correlate social media information related to distinct geographic locations of interest. Together, they started the website ''liveuamap.com'' on 18 February 2014 to monitor

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

n activities in

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...

. They were able to indicate in detail the operations that led to the

annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation In February and March 2014, Russia invaded and subsequently annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. This event took place in the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity and is part of the wider Russo-Ukrainian War. The events in Kyiv th ...

using their

web crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...

. The "UA" letters in the "LiveUAmap" name were originally from the country code for Ukraine, before the "Universal Awareness" acronym was officially proposed by the creators.

Publication method

Their system tracks authors of social media posts of interest by identifying their former posts, number of activities, whom they follow and applies filter techniques to extract relevant information. When an accumulation of correlated messages about an event occurring at a location passes thresholds defined by the algorithms, the situation is listed for human intervention. At least two Liveuamap members decide whether the information about the event is valid, to be used on the map or if further verification is needed. Followup information about the accepted events is used as feedback to improve the system. Liveuamap members use additional sources such as satellite pictures and official communications. Archives are accessible to track the evolution of a particular map.''Liveuamap: About''
liveuamap.com. Retrieved 30 March 2022.

Role as an information source

, the website has been used to track the ongoing

Russo-Ukrainian War The Russo-Ukrainian War; uk, російсько-українська війна, rosiisko-ukrainska viina. has been ongoing between Russia (alongside Russian separatist forces in Donbas, Russian separatists in Ukraine) and Ukraine since Feb ...

since the initial 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine by organizations such as the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

non-governmental organization A non-governmental organization (NGO) or non-governmental organisation (see spelling differences) is an organization that generally is formed independent from government. They are typically nonprofit entities, and many of them are active in h ...

(NGOs) such as Médecins Sans Frontières and newspapers such as ''

Neue Zürcher Zeitung The ''Neue Zürcher Zeitung'' (''NZZ''; "New Journal of Zürich") is a Swiss, German-language daily newspaper, published by NZZ Mediengruppe in Zürich. The paper was founded in 1780. It was described as having a reputation as a high-quality ne ...

''. This service was expanded to cover armed conflicts in many countries and regions, including the Syrian civil war and the Yemeni Civil War that started in 2014, with over 30 maps with comments in eight languages. The company ''Liveuamap.LLC'' is registered in

McLean, Virginia McLean ( ) is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Fairfax County in Northern Virginia. McLean is home to many diplomats, military, members of Congress, and high-ranking government officials partially due to its proxim ...

. According to

Similarweb SimilarWeb Ltd. is an Israeli web analytics company specializing in web traffic and performance. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, the company has 12 offices worldwide. Similarweb went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2021. History The c ...

analysis, Liveuamap had about 60 million web visitors in April 2022, during the 2022 phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about 20 times more than in April 2021.

References

External links

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Syria news
{{2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine Web mapping Russo-Ukrainian War Infographics Internet properties established in 2014 2014 establishments in Ukraine

Creation and name

Publication method

Role as an information source

See also

References

External links