The Lost People

By Hayley Corson-Dosch, Christopher Pierson, Josh Seibel, University of Wisconsin – Madison.

The Lost People interactive web map was designed as an unofficial map-based querying tool for NamUs.gov. NamUs (the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) is a public database for searching cases of missing, unidentified, and unclaimed persons in the United States, including territories. This web map allows the user to not only filter cases within each category by gender, age, ethnicity, and date, but also visualize the distribution and volume of cases at the state, county, and city-level. As this web map was produced for a course project, it is not currently synced with NamUs – the visualized data were pulled from NamUs on 4/18/2020. The Lost People interactive web map was built in Spring 2020 for the Interactive Cartography & Geovisualization course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was designed for desktop use and a general audience of individuals interested in missing, unidentified, and/or unclaimed persons. It was created by Josh Seibel, Hayley Corson-Dosch, and Christopher Pierson – masters students in the Accelerated Master’s in Cartography and GIS program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A demonstration of the interactive web map is available on YouTube.