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Haiti: Online Maps Shift from Charting Damage to Targeting Aid

Image via CrunchBase

by Marc Herman

Here are some maps that humanitarian aid responders are using to communicate the evolving situation in Haiti’s earthquake zone. Nearly a week after the disaster — and aftershocks equal to major temblors — the maps and satellite imagery are proving some of the most reliable information available.

The Ushahidi Network has created a very detailed interactive map overlaying information on threats, people needing assistance, medical care, food and other aid availability by type. The map is being updated as information is received via the Ushahidi network, Twitter and Web form. Ushahidi's Erik Hersman, in an email message, said the system was processing mostly web and Twitter communication in the first days after the quake, because cell networks were down in much of southern Haiti. That's changing and cell service, which is more widely distributed, “is bringing in a lot more reports.”

Image by whiteafrican via Flickr

Crisis Commons, a network of technology professionals that creates tools for humanitarian relief response, has announced that it has undertaken a similar project to map relief efforts and to generate a crisis-specific baseline map of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, for relief agencies to use as planning reference. The project has just begun.

In New York City, the New York Public Library has a series of maps online showing camps where survivors are finding shelter. A second set identifies damaged areas and buildings. They are being edited and updated.

Most other imagery is not interactive, but arguably gives a broader overview of the situation. This image from the Center for Satellite Based Crisis Information measures distances from the quake’s epicenter to where people lived in southern Haiti pre-quake. It’s color-coded to reflect population density.

According to the map, the Hatian state of Leogane, though it has not been identified by name in many news reports, was the quake’s epicenter, and contains several heavily-populated areas. Carrefour, a large suburb of Port-au-Prince, is on Leogane state's border. The city of Jacmel, on the coast, is also in Leogane and badly damaged. As of late yesterday, broken roads and bridges were still cutting off the area, which is closer to the epicenter than Port au Prince is, from receiving aid.

The US Geological Survey has put information into a very easy to read chart of cities by population, color-coded by the quake’s intensity. The result is a very fast way to understand just how many people were living in the places hit hardest by the disaster. USGS has also posted a map of the earthquake reports it has received by phone. It shows perceptions from people phoning the USGS to tell them what they saw.

The NYTimes has created a three-dimensional map that is extremely useful for understanding where Port-au-Prince lies in relation to Haiti’s geology. It shows the city in a coastal plan at the foot of a range of mountains that complicate aid delivery. The Times' map also explains very clearly the location of several neighborhoods where medical aid and food distribution has begun, and shelter has become haltingly available.

Direct satellite imagery is available here. Orbital images taken as recently as yesterday are being compared to images of Port-au-Prince and the environs before the quake, like this one.

The satellite view can determine damage and needs in areas that still do not have reliable communication. In theory, night imagery should be able to tell us something similar about electricity, the availability of light, and perhaps fuel. But if those images are in use, they haven’t been made public yet.

For more on the earthquake in Haiti, visit our Special Coverage page.

The thumbnail image used in this post, Day 15 - Small World, is by kylebaker, used under a Creative Commons license. Visit kylebaker's flickr photostream.

Everyman Offers New Directions in Online Maps - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO — They don’t know it, but people who use Google’s online maps may be getting directions from Richard Hintz.

Mr. Hintz, a 62-year-old engineer who lives in Berkeley, Calif., has tweaked the locations of more than 200 business listings and points of interest in cities across the state, sliding an on-screen place marker down the block here, moving another one across the street there. Farther afield, he has mapped parts of Cambodia and Laos, where he likes to go on motorcycle trips.

Mr. Hintz said these acts of geo-volunteerism were motivated in part by self-interest: he wants to know where he’s going. But “it has this added attraction that it helps others,” he said.

Mr. Hintz is a foot soldier in an army of volunteer cartographers who are logging every detail of neighborhoods near and far into online atlases. From Petaluma to Peshawar, these amateurs are arming themselves with GPS devices and easy-to-use software to create digital maps where none were available before, or fixing mistakes and adding information to existing ones.

Like contributors to Wikipedia before them, they are democratizing a field that used to be the exclusive domain of professionals and specialists. And the information they gather is becoming increasingly valuable commercially.

Google, for example, sees maps playing a growing strategic role in its business, especially as people use cellphones to find places to visit, shop and eat. It needs reliable data about the locations of businesses and other destinations.

“The way you get that data is having users precisely locate things,” said John Hanke, a vice president of product management who oversees Google’s mapping efforts.

People have been contributing information to digital maps for some time, building displays of crime statistics or apartment rentals. Now they are creating and editing the underlying maps of streets, highways, rivers and coastlines.

“It is a huge shift,” said Michael F. Goodchild, a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This is putting mapping where it should be, which is the hands of local people who know an area well.”

That is changing the dynamics of an industry that has been dominated by a handful of digital mapping companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq.

Google is increasingly bypassing those traditional map providers. It has relied on volunteers to create digital maps of 140 countries, including India, Pakistan and the Philippines, that are more complete than many maps created professionally.

Last month Google dropped Tele Atlas data from its United States maps, choosing to rely instead on government data and other sources, including updates from users.

“They have coverage in areas that the big mapping guys don’t have,” said Mike Dobson, a mapping industry consultant who once worked at Rand McNally. “It has the opportunity to cause a lot of disruption in these industries.”

Some people think map data is so valuable that it should be free. OpenStreetMap, a nonprofit group whose mission is to make free maps that can be reused by anyone, has some 180,000 contributors who have mapped many countries in varying levels of detail. The maps are used on a White House Web site that tracks community service opportunities and in many iPhone applications, among other places.

Another collaborative project called WikiMapia is creating its own annotated maps, layered on top of Google’s.

Traditional mapmakers are seeking to adapt by tapping their own citizen cartographers. Tele Atlas, which TomTom bought last year for $4.3 billion, now uses feedback from users of TomTom’s navigation devices to update its maps.

But Tele Atlas says its customers, who might be in delivery trucks or emergency vehicles, can’t rely fully on community-created maps, any more than historians can rely on Wikipedia.

“Most of our customers expect a level of due diligence and quality that is way more than what a community is going to put together,” said Patrick McDevitt, vice president of global engineering at Tele Atlas.

Defenders of the amateur approach point out that professionally created maps often have errors and can be slow to add road closures and other updates. Google has moderators who try to verify the accuracy of users’ changes, unless they are very minor, while OpenStreetMap relies on its members to police changes.

“As far as we can tell so far, these new sources are as accurate as the traditional ones,” Professor Goodchild said.

Contributors to OpenStreetMap have turned mapmaking into a social activity. Last month, a group of some 200 volunteers in Atlanta braved the wind and drizzle to collect map data across the city. Armed with GPS devices, cameras and paper maps of neighborhoods, they added missing alleys, public art, restaurants and hotels.

John L. Kittle Jr., a 55-year-old engineer, was one participant. In the past, Mr. Kittle has corrected street names in Atlanta and improved the map for his home town of Decatur, Ga. Recently an acquaintance mentioned that she lived in a new condo development, and Mr. Kittle added it to the map.

“Seeing an error on a map is the kind of thing that gnaws at me,” he said. “By being able to fix it, I feel like the world is a better place in a very small but measurable way.”

Mr. Kittle said contributing to a project where anyone can freely use the mapping data was important to him. Others, like Mr. Hintz, said they could make a greater contribution through Google, whose maps are widely used.

Some of the most remarkable efforts of amateur map makers are in countries where few, if any, digital maps existed. Google first tested a tool called Map Maker in India, where people immediately began tracing and labeling roads and buildings on top of satellite images provided by Google.

When Google released the tool more broadly last year, Faraz Ahmad, a 26-year-old programmer from Pakistan who lives in Glasgow, took one look at the map of India and decided he did not want to see his homeland out-mapped by its traditional rival. So he began mapping Pakistan in his free time, using information from friends, family and existing maps. Mr. Ahmad is now the top contributor to Map Maker, logging more than 41,000 changes.

Maps are political, of course, and community-edited maps can set off conflicts. When Mr. Ahmad tried to work on the part of Kashmir that is administered by Pakistan, he found that Map Maker wouldn’t allow it. He said his contributions were finally accepted by the Map Maker team, which is led by engineers based in India, but only after a long e-mail exchange.

At his request, Google is now preventing further changes to the region, after people in India tried to make it part of their country, Mr. Ahmad said. “Whenever you have a Pakistani and an Indian doing something together, there is a political discussion or dispute.”

A Google spokeswoman, Elaine Filadelfo, said Google sometimes blocked changes to contentious areas “with an eye to avoiding back-and-forth editing.”

Online Digital Maps: Getting Ready for 3-D Street Maps from Tele Atlas

A very interesting read. The article focuses on a company named Tele Atlas.

From the Article:

Meet the people at Tele Atlas, the company that provides so-called “base maps” to such high-profile clients as Google, MapQuest and RIM, the maker of the BlackBerry. Tele Atlas also provides digital-mapping services for its corporate owner, the portable-navigation company TomTom.

It goes on…

Images collected by the vans’ cameras don’t make it to the public because Tele Atlas doesn’t have an application like Google Street View. But it soon may have something that’s arguably even better.

That brings us to the vans’ side-sweeping lasers. As the vans drive, their lasers constantly scan the road and everything around it, recording information that Tele Atlas calls the “first reflective surface.” This includes the width, height and contours of every building the van passes.

This data, when combined with the images captured by the cameras, will help Tele Atlas create a 3-D world.

Three-dimensional digital maps already are common in Japan and Western Europe. But 3-D maps are still in their primitive stages in the U.S., where their quality depends on the type of device they’re displayed on.

[Snip]

Within 18 months, Tele Atlas hopes to develop a powerful navigation system whose images will look almost identical to the surroundings through which we travel.

Source: CNN

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