Revolutions usually mean human rights violations, lots of them.
Patrick Meier has a project to collect evidence of mass human rights violations in Syria.
See: Help Crowdsource Satellite Imagery Analysis for Syria: Building a Library of Evidence
Topic maps are an ideal solution to link objects in dated satellite images to eye witness accounts, captured military documents, ground photos, news accounts and other information.
I say that for two reasons:
First, with a topic map you can start from any linked object in a photo, a witness account, ground photo or news account and see all related evidence for that location. Granted that takes someone authoring that collation but it doesn’t have to be only one someone.
Second, topic maps offer parallel subject processing, which can distribute the authoring task in a crowd-sourced project, for instance. For example, I could be doing photo analysis and marking the location of military checkpoints. That would generate topics and associations for the geographic location, the type of installation, dates (from the photos), etc. Someone else could be interviewing witnesses and taking their testimony. As part of the processing of that testimony, another volunteer codes an approximate date and geographic location in connection with part of that testimony. Still another person is coding military orders by identified individuals for checkpoints that include the one in question. Associations between all these separately encoded bits of evidence, each unknown to the individual volunteers becomes a mouse-click away from coming to the attention of anyone reviewing the evidence. And determining responsibility.
The alternative, the one most commonly used, is to have an under-staffed international group piece together the best evidence it can from a sea of documents, photos, witness accounts, etc. An adequate job for the resources they have, but why settle for an “adequate” job when it can be done properly with 21st century technology?