Haiti and disaster mapping
Jan. 15th, 2010 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andygatesI must confess, there's a part of me that worried about the prurience of scrambling to update a map of a disaster zone. That's what I and scads of others have been doing on OpenStreetMap since the Haiti quake struck. On its own, as just another map, that might be true, but OSM's not on its own like that.
It took about twelve hours to get the coverage in Port-au-Prince (PAP) up to best in breed, and at the same time the amazing flexibility of wikis was coming into play. GeoEye provided a Bourne-style high-res satellite image of the day after the quake; it was deployed as a traceable background layer. A tagging schema was agreed in IRC and mailing lists and wikispace for refugee camps, damaged buildings and blocked roads; the OSM deep nerds set regular extracts running so fresh maps are always available for agency GIS, routing, satnav and so on. In parallel, the map was amped up in detail and at the same time the disaster-specific information was sourced, implemented, distributed. "Please tag camps and graveyards". Grim.
It could still be prurience: zooming in to see, is that rubble or a crowd? tents or tin roofs? collapsed buildings or just shanty neighbourhoods? - it has the fun of a resource-management computer game -- until one of the search and rescue teams said thanks for the Garmin extract. And then the kid on the news is shown camped in a football pitch you spotted earlier. Then it all gets a little bit real.
Medicin sans Frontiers will be in with an inflatable hospital soon, and the USS Carl Vinson just arrived with the USNS Comfort en route. They'll get marked up once they lay anchor. The system is insanely agile, the wiki mantra "assume good faith" paying off in spades.
It took about twelve hours to get the coverage in Port-au-Prince (PAP) up to best in breed, and at the same time the amazing flexibility of wikis was coming into play. GeoEye provided a Bourne-style high-res satellite image of the day after the quake; it was deployed as a traceable background layer. A tagging schema was agreed in IRC and mailing lists and wikispace for refugee camps, damaged buildings and blocked roads; the OSM deep nerds set regular extracts running so fresh maps are always available for agency GIS, routing, satnav and so on. In parallel, the map was amped up in detail and at the same time the disaster-specific information was sourced, implemented, distributed. "Please tag camps and graveyards". Grim.
It could still be prurience: zooming in to see, is that rubble or a crowd? tents or tin roofs? collapsed buildings or just shanty neighbourhoods? - it has the fun of a resource-management computer game -- until one of the search and rescue teams said thanks for the Garmin extract. And then the kid on the news is shown camped in a football pitch you spotted earlier. Then it all gets a little bit real.
Medicin sans Frontiers will be in with an inflatable hospital soon, and the USS Carl Vinson just arrived with the USNS Comfort en route. They'll get marked up once they lay anchor. The system is insanely agile, the wiki mantra "assume good faith" paying off in spades.
