ASM
OSM Comes of Age
It seems that the most comprehensive and accurate map of Port au Prince is OpenStreetMap. For people with an interest in mapping, this is one of the most profound stories to come out of the Haitian earthquake. OSM has become the defacto map of choice in disasters.
The story begins with CrisisCommons, an international group established to provide information in disaster scenarios. The group has a wiki at www.crisiscommons.org
When the disaster occurred, the map of the Haitian capital, Port au Price, showed little more than the three main roads, the Boulevard Harry Truman, Boulevard Jean-Jacque Dessalines and Nationale No 2, all of which converge near the Port au Prince waterfront.
Volunteers organised by CrisisCommons, most of them not in Haiti, used archive satellite images to draw out the road network, which was annotated by people on the ground. These locals were also able to locate triage centres, camps and hospital on the map.
Meanwhile Crisis Commons obtained before and after images of the city and divided them up into 500 x 500 metre blocks. These blocks were then distributed to volunteers at universities around the world. According to a report in New Scientist magazine, it took less than two days to map every collapsed building in the earthquake zone, around 5000 buildings in all, and pinpoint them on OSM.
The result of this work is that the city has gone from having virtually no maps, to a state-of-the-art map, in less than two weeks. Its difficult to know whether this work has made a difference. It is being used by the World Bank, as well as other NGOs, to guide their work. But whether it has saved lives is difficult to quantify. A study of the effectiveness of the work by CrisisCommons is being planned.
What is no longer in doubt, however, is that it is possible to use crowd sourcing to produce high quality maps on an emergency basis. National mapping agencies, who typically take years to produce a map sheet, will be interested in the results. So will emergency responders and others who demand current information.
