OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of maps and so it's a map that citizens contribute to.
It's a map that appears on the website OpenStreetMap.org but then you can edit it.
What OpenStreetMap really is, it's a citizen generated database
of geographical information. This is very different to the way Google organizes
itself, they have a set of map products. Google's business is more about places
where there is commercially valuable information, where there is revenue to be had.
They never publish the raw data that makes up the map, the coordinates of
the streets for example, all of that data is kept locked away
in Google's case, because that's their commercial advantage.
Organizations like the Ordnance Survey, here in the UK, they have always had
raw map data which they will license to other organizations, at great cost. So OpenStreetMap
was formed here in the UK actually out of frustration.
It was a surprise to the people who started the project actually there are a lot of
people out there that really wanted Open License map data so badly that they are
willing to do this crazy thing of going out in the street with the GPS unit trying
to build a map from scratch.
We are trying to empty our minds of other maps because you don't want to be
accused of copying, we were trying to create a brand new map which was open licensed,
but we're gonna fill in streets and gather the street names and all that
very basic data, and then
over time here in London we've seen all all the streets mapped out in a lot of detail,
but that's just London of course and we've seen the coverage of the map spreading
but you get these wonderful blossoms of detail appearing as just one person gets
interested in it.
Unfortunately we do have an uneven level of coverage, this is one of the
challenges of working with OpenStreetMap data,
there's no guarantee that a particular level of detail has been reached everywhere.
We are consumers of maps in order primarily to find out
where patients are and where their greatest needs are, and if we
find that an area of tremendous vulnerability and where there's a lot of
humanitarian and medical need and interest, that there isn't sufficient
base mapping well there's nothing stopping us from contributing it.
The canonical example of humanitarian OpenStreetMap work was in Haiti after
the earthquake, when there was an incredible rash of volunteer mapping that
happened, and it created an extraordinary detailed map of the Capital Area Port-au-Prince.
Everyone was sitting at home watching the news, watching the disastrous earthquake
in Haiti and I think a lot of the OSM
community sort of naturally felt curious to see how much data we had, how is the
map looking in Haiti?
it was looking very bare, we had a few roads in place, and so we were
thinking, well maybe we should try and boost the coverage of of the cities
where this disaster has struck. People just started contributing to the map in that area.
This is a process of remote mapping so looking at the aerial imagery that we have available to us.
When we had our patients coming to the cholera centers
and they tell us where they're from
because of the OpenStreetMap work that had been done, we were able actually correlate
those neighborhoods that they gave us as their origins to actual places and
figure out where more patients were coming from and where for example there were
water outages, which we were then able to help correct.
So in that sense the map actually helped to save lives.
Humanitarian OSM work has been done in the Haitian earthquake, the ebola disaster
that just happened, the Nepal earthquake, the Philippines typhoon and all of these
places increasingly as time goes on, it's the default map and it's happening with
volunteers all over the world. But it's still very much also about on the ground
surveys, so we are encouraging the community to go out and look at the real
world with their own eyes and that's how you can really create a unique valuable
data set that really has a sense of ownership with the community living in a local area.
So increasingly we're starting to encourage our field teams to collect
that geographical data about their
activities and put it on OpenStreetMap. We generally ask permission
you know, do you mind if we put your village on the map? Invariably what
people say 'yes we'd like to be on the map, we'd like for people to know that we exist.'
Every month we have a mapathon in London which attracts 75 to 100 people and they
sit down and they trace some area, last month we were doing Chad. We bring 100 people
and some pizzas, and maybe a few bottles of beer or wine and everyone sits down and
looks at the satellite imagery and traces the things that are necessary.
We need you to trace the houses here, we need the road network there, we need the water courses
but it's actually contributing meaningfully in real time to actual
humanitarian operations.
In a way OpenStreetMap could be thought of delivering real power to developers and powering an
ecosystem of different third parties doing really interesting stuff with OpenStreetMap data.
And there's still lots of niches for people to organise that data. There are
several companies that actually make quite a good living organizing and
presenting the OpenStreetMap data very usefully so
I don't think having all this data out there in an open format is going to
destroy business opportunities,
quite the contrary I think it's going to create them.