humanitarian.info » geospatial

OpenStreetMap Palestine

Paul Currion — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:11:31 +0000

Previously. Now: there’s a new mailing list [http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ps: register at talk-ps@openstreetmap.org] for people who want to get involved in mapping in Gaza and the West Bank. They’re still looking for people with direct knowledge of Gaza to join in the editing process. A particular note for me:

In the process, agencies like UNOSAT and EC JRC have started selective release of their data sets .. a great start to open geodata exchange. The OpenStreetMap Wiki has an extensive (perhaps the greatest) collection of Palestinian geodata on the internet, all collected rapidly through crowdsourcing. [My emphasis.]

See? Crowdsourcing can work.¹ More can be found on Mikel’s blog at http://brainoff.com/weblog/index.php?s=gaza+openstreetmap.

Sometimes.

Why we need intelligent design

Paul Currion — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:44:59 +0000

Only joking – intelligent design theory is a truckle of incoherent hand-waving. What I meant to say, of course, is that we need to be thinking about better design when it comes to information products, particularly maps. Last week Rich Treves tried to destroy my self-confidence by posting a picture which is invisible to people colour-blind in the red-green spectrum¹ but he agreed that we have a problem in neogeography, a trend which started as GIS became more easily accessible.

One of my colleagues lamented that the new generation of GIS technicians lacked any real training in cartography (or had slept through that lesson on their course) – the ease with which GIS enabled mapmaking had lowered the barrier to entry, and a whole bunch of new folks were making maps without even having read How To Lie With Maps. My colleague had a vested interest – he had originally been a cartographer before training up in GIS. Neither of us were arguing against GIS or against neogeography, both of which are fantastic leaps forward as far as I’m concerned. We were only arguing that there’s a danger that cartography gets left behind, and that’s a problem – not because it’s some sort of artisan skill which needs to be kept alive, but because cartography is more relevant than ever in an age where maps are everywhere.

With more maps in front of more people than ever before, the obligation on the map maker to communicate effectively is imperative – and in the end, that effective communication depends on good design. Rich’s blog is devoted to the question of how to improve design in neogeography² but there’s still a big design gap. The question is, how can we collectively improve our work? The whole point of neogeography is that it lowers the barrier to entry, so a top-down approach (training, qualifications, etc) won’t fly with the community, let alone make an impact; yet there seems to be little in the way of standards or good practice emerging from the grassroots.

Since I am one such person I wept uncontrollably even while I was typing my comment in.
And please, won’t somebody fund him to go to Where 2.0 so he can spread the word?

MapAction Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping

Paul Currion — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:57:58 +0000

MapAction have been a positive force in terms of rolling out humanitarian mapping in the field. Not content with walking the walk, they’re also talking the talk with the publication of a Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping [pdfÂ 3.1MB]. A practical guide for aid workers, it focuses on free resources to produce basic maps – an introduction to the topic of GIS, followed by chapters on GPS use, Google Earth and MapWindow.¹ I’llÂ let head honcho Nigel Woof do the rest:

The guide is aimed at aid workers who are not GIS specialists, so it may not be useful for those who are already technically advanced in GIS. However, we would greatly appreciate it if you could help to disseminate the guide to anyone whom you think may find it useful. We are particularly trying to reach NGOs. This first edition is very much a â€˜betaâ€™ version and we would like to expand and update it later this year; so we would very much welcome your comments and feedback.

My short review: this is a fantastic addition to the field of humanitarian GIS, and it definitely fills a gap in the market for aidworkers who have no GIS experience but want to start mapping to support their work. Download it and distribute it to everybody you meet on your next mission, and let’s see if we can’t turn this ship around towards the fabled lost continent of Maplantis.

I’ve got to be honest – I’ve never used MapWindow, so I can’t tell you how useful this is. It’s built on .NET though, which strikes fear into my Xubuntu heart. Grass!

Assessing Gaza from an armchair in space

Paul Currion — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:15:31 +0000

Following my thoughts about being mapless in Gaza, I wanted to follow up on the work of UNITAR-UNOSAT, who have made the leap from the more basic satellite images that they used to provide, and are now regularly providing damage assessments. Their analysis of postwar damage in Georgia was very interesting¹ and now they’re producing similar damage assessments over Gaza, with a commitment to update as often as they get new images.

I mentioned the .kmz file that Stefan at Ogle Earth has been putting together, which includes the UNOSAT layer. Stefan also lamented the fact that – while they provide frequent updates and quality outputs – UNOSAT products are only provided in PDF format.

And yet, the result, always, is a PDF map, which is great for printing out but not any good for any other kind of use. In some cases, the PDFs are locked against everything but printing, which means taking screenshots in order to rasterize them for placement in Google Earth… Given the global scope of these maps, their timeliness and usefulness, wouldn’t it be great if these were automatically published as KML to the Global Awareness default layer in Google Earth? People wouldn’t even need to go look for maps when they zoom in on a region hit by an emergency.

Well, I’ll agree with Stefan up to a point. PDF files are useful for nothing except printing – but most of UNOSAT’s potential users only want to print them , and playing around with the data is the last thing on their minds. However the good news is that it looks like they’re already starting – the damage assesssment data is also available as a geodatabase file and as a .kmz file. Einar has been circulating these versions to people working on the response, but has reservations on two grounds.

The first is regarding the added value of releasing the data more widely – what is it, exactly? My response is that to fulfill their mission as effectively as possible, UNOSAT should be producing multiple formats and distributing across various distribution channels – and a side effect of this will be an increase the possibility of useful and interesting applications emerging. We can’t predict what they might be – and they might not even appear – but the whole neogeography field is based around innovation – it just needs the data to enable it.
The second concern is more difficult to address – the question of whether the data will be misinterpreted or misused. This data will never be 100% accurate, which can lead to criticism of the agency publishing it if people don’t understand that. There’s also a slim chance that the data might be abused – for example, to misrepresent the situation on the ground – although the chances of this seem very small. My response to these problems is that people are free to criticise on the basis of the PDF file already, and releasing the data is unlikely to increase the type or frequency of criticism. We faced this all the time in the Humanitarian Information Centres – people would come in waving a printout and saying “Your maps are wrong!”, to which charge we would patiently explain that all maps are wrong, and would they like to help us improve?

To some extent Open Street Map have already started to deal with these issues using their existing community mechanisms, but UNOSAT is different – it’s a formal organisation in a large bureaucracy without the mandate or means to deal with public enquiries like this. Perhaps the best approach would be a tag-team of UNOSAT and OSM – sharing data as widely as possible, with UNOSAT the corporate source and OSM the buffer to address these issues as they arise?

Although under-utilized on the ground – that’s the next obstacle we have to overcome, guys!

Mapless in Gaza

Paul Currion — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:03:28 +0000

Stefan delivers the Google Earth goods:

UNOSAT has just released a map dated January 9 that contains satellite imagery of Gaza City acquired by the WorldView-1 Satellite on January 6… I’ve added that map to the Gaza maps network link for Google Earth, which in the meantime also contains the updated OCHA Gaza situation map, dated January 8.

While Jon gets irate about the state of humanitarian mapping in 2009:

Impressive work all around but I need to gripe about what I see as an antiquated way of approaching humanitarian disasters at least as far as mapping is concerned… We canâ€™t keep doing this.Â We need to evolve.Â There are too many people relying on us.Â It is time to work past licensing issues, or whatever the real issues are, and start making substantive changes.

And Mikel defends the indefensible prospect of better maps of Gaza:

Thereâ€™s a again an presumption of insider knowledge here, that anyone who is operating in Gaza is going to know whatâ€™s up. I donâ€™t believe that… There are better things for you to do for Gazans. Donâ€™t do this. Most of us canâ€™t do anything directly. Actually no one from anywhere can get into Gaza to help. Why discourage a contribution?

I’m with all of these guys, all of whom are doing sterling work in trying to push the boulder of humanitarian mapping up a particularly steep hill called “business as usual”. Nigel Woof at MapAction recently asked me for feedback on the main lines of progress in humanitarian GIS in the last year¹ but I still feel like my 2006 essay on is largely still accurate – although I will agree that it fails to cover neogeography particularly well²

I still feel that our biggest problem is our lack of a clear objective in improving spatial data provision. I agree with Mikel that the OSM approach can really improve data quality in real time – but if nobody will use that data, then it calls into question the whole endeavour³ – but I would still encourage people to contribute to OSM on the basis that it is a long-term investment in a public good.

But still nobody answers my basic questions - who are these maps for, when are these maps for, what are these maps for? Maybe different projects answer different needs – but then we run into the interoperability question (I agree with Jon here – PDF files? In 2009?). Crowdsourcing alone isn’t the answer, but in this case it’s a better start than business as usual.

And Nigel – apologies for not getting back to you sooner.
Time for an update, possibly.
See also Ushahidi for another application of this objection.

New Year High Resolution….

Paul Currion — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:29:25 +0000

High resolution satellite imagery, that is… zing! While the news from the Middle East may be depressing as hell, it has provided a stimulus for Open Street Map to improve their spatial data for Gaza. Jon has done a comparison of existing online maps, showing Google Maps to the initial winner – although OSM are working hard to update their offering, and as Jon says “the flexibility OSM has shows itâ€™s value as a quickly adaptable humanitarian tool.”

Following OSM’s initial request for support, Alertnet ran the story yesterday, and updates will be posted on Mikel’s blog. This is worthwhile stuff – as well as being potentially useful for people working in that area, it’s a long-term contribution towards the spatial data infrastructure of the middle east. If you have any knowledge of Gaza, then you can contribute via the Wiki – and if you’ve got any of that high-resolution sat imagery, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you…

Innovation, ReliefWeb and Vacancies

Paul Currion — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:45:40 +0000

I promised Lorant Czaran¹ that I would post something about ReliefWeb‘s job vacancies mash-up – and then realised that it would fit perfectly with this discussion about innovation. I’ve written about ReliefWeb before, but it’s not exactly noted for cutting edge web 2.0 efforts. However, no matter what its faults, it’s the single most important website for the humanitarian community, which is why it’s good to see them trying some new approaches.

I’m not claiming that searching for jobs on ReliefWeb is an especially humanitarian activity, but it is an activity that a lot of humanitarians do. One of the things that I completely failed to understand about their redesign a a couple of years ago is why they relegated the Vacancies section to the bottom of the “Professional Resources” part of the site, rather than foregrounding it. The reason for foregrounding? Simply that vacancies are one of the main reasons that people go to the site in the first place.

Vacancies shouldn’t be the focus of the entire site, but they should be a focus of the user experience. Lorant and his team took a strong step forward here, introducing a new way of interacting with the site – a Google Maps mash-up which can also be downloaded as a Google Earth KML file. This is a great idea, and well executed, given ReliefWeb’s disturbingly 90s website design – but why does this fit with the innovation theme? AFter all, Google Map mash-ups aren’t exactly new, even in the humanitarian sector.

What’s innovative about it is that it shows the way forward not just for job searches but for the entire ReliefWeb site. There’s no reason why the enitire site couldn’t be organised in this way, with navigation based entirely on geography – after all, that’s the way the humanitarian community itself works. I’d love to see this approach extended to become the front page of the website, offering a way into the main Countries and Emergencies section. There’s very few parts of the site that don’t offer themselves up to a geospatial interface.

So what about those few parts that don’t – Policy and Issues, for example? Well you couldn’t do a Google Maps mash-up for those things – but why couldn’t you do a policy map instead, showing the different links between sectors and institutions? Or a tag cloud approach, showing which issues are the ones that are generating the most publications and discussion? Either of these would offer a better user experience that would make ReliefWeb not just important but innovative as well….

Ex-ReliefWeb, now UN-Spider, which is the most awesomest UN acronym ever, by the way

Quickbits July 2008

Paul Currion — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:26:32 +0000

Aldo Benini was writing about and developing humanitarian information management before I even started my professional career. I’ve always respected his work and was always saddened that we didn’t have more chances to work together. I’ve just discovered that his website makes nearly all of his research is available, including his latest work on Linking Lists of Data.
BusinessWeek does a big section on disaster management, although it seems a little confused about it, as well. Janet Ginsburg writes about the Do-Good Imperative, Kleinberg and Kirkpatrick talkabout Disaster Tech, and there are a couple of reasonable articles on Public-Private alliances and Making Maps Work when Disaster Strikes. The latter is notable because it focuses on open approaches rather than GIS per se – presumably the personal interest of the writer rather than a shift in general perception, though….
New Scientist tells us Web hits used to pinpoint earthquakes. The idea that web traffic provides a proxy for earthquake impacts (lots of people trying to get information about what’s going on, or possibly losing internet connectivity) is interesting, but the quote that it “could rival dedicated seismological equipment” indicates that the New Scientists have been huffing the industrial solvent again.
It wouldn’t be a humanitarian.info post if I didn’t mention Google Earth or Google Maps, would it now? Google’s Nairobi office has launched the online Kenya map, which is a step forward in terms of improving access to geospatial data in Africa and creates a host of new opportunities for local techies. Meanwhile Rich Treves points to another interesting Google Earth tool to deal with the hidden treasure problem – go test it to death. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think either the magnifying glass or the placemark are a long-term solution to this problem – there needs to be some type of pre-subscribed filter effect built in to Google Earth itself, maybe?)
At the end of the news, you usually get a more light-hearted item, and this is as close as I could get: Telecoms Sans Frontieres have left Burma in the white hot glare of BBC news. Was anybody really surprised? It’s Burma, guys – they’re not big fans of improving the general population’s capacity to communicate with the outside world – and now you’re never ever ever getting back in…

More SDI please

Paul Currion — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:29:35 +0000

Those crazy jokers at the UN Joint Logistics Centre have just released version 2.0 of the UN Spatial Data Infrastructure for Transport database schema, based on feedback received since last September’s release and developed with WFP and Ithaca (good to see that partnership being productive). This version covers an XML schema, the schema documentation, template databases and emergency assessment forms. The main main changes in version 2.0 include:

1. “Light” and “Comprehensive” UNSDIT packages. The most significant change has been the packaging of a “Light” subset of the Comprehensive UNSDIT package to better match information requirements in sudden-onset emergencies.

Now this is a very smart idea indeed. When you’re doing the emergency response end, the last thing you want is to wade through a massive amount of barely-relevant data or fill out a single field in a 400-field db. A light version makes a lot of sense – I’d be interested to know what the process was for deciding what what was included and what wasn’t.

2. “Light” UNSDIT Assessment forms. The same concern guided the choice to release an assessment package narrowed to the minimal set of information requirements of a sudden onset emergency response.

An even smarter idea. This is something that should be adopted by all the clusters, not just logistics.

3. ESRI Personal Geodatabase and Shapefile template databases. UNSDIT template databases aligned to version 2.0 of the UNSDIT schema are made available through this release as ESRI Personal Geodatabase and Shapefile to better serve for partners operating within an open source environment.

And it gets smarter still!

Some additional news worth reporting: UNJLC is planning to offer a Web Mapping/Reporting and a data download service at some point, which will be a considerable step forward (and hopefully be more useful than GeoNetwork is currently – jpeg maps of goat distribution, anybody?).

Seminar on Remote Sensing, Satellite Imagery and Humanitarian Crises

Paul Currion — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:48:42 +0000

Short notice, but the Humanitarian Futures Programme will be hosting a seminar on Wednesday 25 June at Kingâ€™s College, London. Focus is on satellite imagery and its future uses by the humanitarian community in monitoring natural hazards, climate change and health. If you’re around London, it should be interesting – plus, free lunch! Come on, everybody likes a free lunch, especially in London.

Speaker:Professor Bhupendra Jasani, Kingâ€™s College London
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Time: 12.30-14.00
Venue: Kingâ€™s College, London, main Strand Campus
Cost: Free, Lunch provided