Within the extensive underground complex lies a nerve center called the Map Room. In this twenty-four hour-a-day operations center, military personnel worked to collect, verify, and disseminate information to government officials. Much of their work was done using maps. In the recreated Map Room, world and regional maps line the walls and show the location of resources and front lines.
One large map was filled with wool string and push-pins connecting the string into boundaries. The various colors of the wool represented different fronts in the war (i.e. red wool represented the confirmed current front, black wool represented the limit of the German advance in 1941, blue wool represented the limit of the German advance in 1942, and pink wool represented the start of the Russian advance in 1943).
Additional push-pins in this map and others covering the walls represented military assets as well as resources, such as supply ships.
The Map Rooms contained a collection of variously colored phones that connected Map Room officials with heads of military departments and the Prime Minister’s office. Through these phones, the Map Room staff collected, verified, and presented geographic information around the clock. The Map Room provided the War Cabinet and other British officials with a daily situation report by eight o'clock each morning, seven days a week. The Map Room staff undoubtedly worked for many hours to produce this report during World War II.
Today, their information would be collected and entered into geographic information systems (GIS) software on a computer and thus maps and geographic situation reports could be produced instantly with all available data. Although the data collection would take hours and hours, as it did during time of war, once that data was collected and confirmed, it could be entered into the GIS to produce intelligent maps for the use of decision makers.
