humanitarian.info

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 can’t keep doing this.  We need to evolve.  There are too many people relying on us.  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:

There’s a again an presumption of insider knowledge here, that anyone who is operating in Gaza is going to know what’s up. I don’t believe that… There are better things for you to do for Gazans. Don’t do this. Most of us can’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.

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

Rich Treves blogs on Google Earth design, and his ideas are solid (I particularly like his post on 2005 – 2015: the Lost Decade of Neo-Geography?). A recent interest in humanitarian applications, and some discussions with people like Nigel Woof of MapAction, have lead him to develop TMapper, a thematic mapping tool for Google Earth. Needless to say, this is exactly the sort of thing that I was looking for in Bangladesh (and would doubtless be useful for Myanmar, ahem).

Now, I haven’t been able to play with this yet, because my shonky mobile internet connection means that the download is too large and difficult. However from the description this looks like a first step in making Google Earth more versatile, which can only be a good thing. I’m slightly worried by the .NET dependency, and I worry that perhaps this might end up falling between two stools – too complicated for non-GIS folk to easily use, and too lightweight for GIS folk to feel comfortable with.

Nobody’s perfect, however, and at least this is something we can test. Thanks to Rich for giving this some thought and putting in the time – he’s looking for feedback, so if you want to play around with TMapper, let him know.