Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Mission 3 to Haiti – Day 1

Today I’m off on a 2 and a half week trip with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in Haiti. After the earthquake in January OpenStreetMap proved to be an invaluable basemap of Haiti. Initially all of the edits were occurring remotely from all over the world. The community within OSM created various extracts of the data used by GIS Analysts, USARS teams and many others working on the ground and from afar. The amazing collaboration during that time has been captured in various blog posts and conference talks.

Now that actions have switched from immediate emergency to rebuilding and cleanup the goals of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team have changed some as well. Our focus is on capacity building and training those working on the ground. Through intensive all day training sessions we lead groups from data collection with GPS and Walking Papers to editing within JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor). Following up on two previous missions that included mapping within Port-au-Prince and Jacmel our intent is to continue moving outward into other cities within Haiti. Now that hurricane season is upon us building this mapping capacity is more important than ever.

Preparation for our trip proved intensive. There were vaccines to obtain, equipment to procure and training materials to create and review. I was primarily responsible for creating more H.O.T. Kits as we call them. A H.O.T. Kit is a pelican case containing a printer/scanner, a laptop, GPS units, batteries and an external hard drive for data. Currently there are already two such kits in Haiti left behind from previous missions, but as we expand into other areas the need for more kits was clear. The kits are left behind in country after the H.O.T. Team leaves to continued editing and collection of OpenStreetMap data can happen. There was no additional budget for more kits for this mission. Fortunately the community once again proved amazing, I was able to raise $1000.00 for GPS units and ESRI donated laptops.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team wouldn’t be anything without the people. We are following up on the amazing groundwork laid by Dane Springmeyer, Robert Soden and Nicolas Chavent on two previous missions. This mission includes the amazing guidance of Nicolas Chavent bringing his invaluable experience from the previous two missions as well as three new actors including myself, Todd Huffman and Trevor Ellermann. Everyone brings their own unique experiences and skills to the team. Nicolas and his key GIS and humanitarian experience, myself with my experience in mapping in a variety of field conditions with many types of data. Todd’s creativity solving problems in unique ways in difficult environments and Trevor’s technical skills in system administration and programming.

Naturally the most compelling reason I felt to join this mission was to help. Having the opportunity to assist in a more hands on way than I have previously is a privilege. The secondary but more personally compelling reason I felt to go to Haiti is to see the land I’ve spent the past months intensively mapping, discussing and coordinating data around. The only comparable effort I was involved in was during Katrina five years ago. I didn’t actually visit New Orleans until a month ago, even five years later to experience the land I spent so much time looking at above was a learning experience. You learn so much more about imagery interpretation and data analysis by actually being in the environment you are analyzing. I hope that my trip will enable me to be even more effective in the future in other response efforts.

June 14, 2010   Posted in: Crisis Mapping, OSM  2 Comments

Talking MappingDC at Ignite DC

Back in October I spoke at Ignite DC #2 about MappingDC and OpenStreetMap.  An Ignite event structure is 16 speakers who each speak for 5 minutes with auto-rotating slides. This was my first time participating in Ignite as a speaker and it was great to talk about mapping. Since my talk MappingDC has continued to have mapping parties and work on importing DC GIS data.

The next Ignite DC is on February 18th, there are only sponsorship tickets left. If you are lucky enough to already have a ticket I’ll see you there.

February 10, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: MappingDC, OSM  One Comment

CrisisCamp/CrisisCommons Movement

Since the earthquake occurred in Haiti I’ve been fortunate to be involved with a tremendous group of people. I’ve unfortunately been too busy working with that group to write about it at all. Sitting on a plane has fortunately given me the opportunity to reflect and be able to blog about it.

After the earthquake occurred in Haiti the following day there was an informal meeting. It was a group of people getting together and saying ‘Well, what can we do?” It was decided to have another CrisisCamp, this time a hackathon. That Wednesday we didn’t have a location, we just had set a date and time for that Saturday. We had no idea how many people would show up nor where we were going to hold the event. The following day there was an outpouring of offers of places to host it. The Sunlight Foundation ended up being chosen, Sunlight already has experience with large scale hackathons which helped event run smoothly.

Before the crowd showed up project managers were chosen for each project. Clay Johnson from the Sunlight Labs was going to be the main leader to which all the other project managers would report. People starting showing up and there was a kickoff meeting, people were all assigned to projects and began work. I was the project leader for the geospatial group with Katie Filbert another MappingDC member. We ended up being a group of about 30 people varying from geospatial programmers like myself to regular MappingDC contributors to people who had laptop and wanted to help. Jumpstart Labs even handed out all the computers that they had available to people as well. Our group was so large we were moved offsite to another office to work.

The group began by learning how to digitize satellite imagery and add it to OpenStreetMap. Our focus was roads, since a lot of the areas outside Port-au-Prince still had not been covered. I’m not sure how much data we really contributed that day. The mass of people made the network somewhat slow and there were varying learning curves in the group. The GIS people were fairly resourceful and ended up downloading imagery locally and using QGIS with its OSM plugin to edit. I have no statistics if the people we trained have continued to edit, but I hope that is the case. So many people want to help and OpenStreetMap is a map for everyone.

All the contributors to the hackathon got back together at the end of the day to report the status of their projects. You can see those projects on the front of CrisisCommons. CrisisCommons itself was transformed from a blank page into a professional looking website at the hackathon. The event really shows what can happen when people with focus and a desire to help can do when they get together. Key also was strong leadership as well, Clay wrote a blog post about leading large volunteer hackathons which describes what he did that was key for us.

Since last Saturday I’ve continued to work on creating, sharing and obtaining data for those helping in Haiti. Thanks to gentle pressure from Noel Dickover and Andrew Turner I was motivated to make a video showing the basics of the training I gave in digitizing roads. To help with the push to map the camps that have formed in Haiti I also made a second video as well. In the amazing collaboration that has been throughout CrisisCommons and CrisisCamp Yoav Lurie even made a website iMapHaiti with both the training videos and other getting started materials for OpenStreetMap.

There are CrisisCamps occuring all of the multiple countries this weekend and I can’t wait to see what comes out of the effort. The past week has been both saddening due to all the loss of life, but also thrilling to see how people have come together. The best part of CrisisCommons is I don’t think this is just about this disaster. This will be about making crisis response better in the future.

Want to get involved? Go to CrisisCommons to get started.

January 23, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: CrisisCommons, OSM  One Comment

Update from Google Map on my Problem

Today I received notification that the problem I reported on Google Maps was corrected.  You can now route through White’s Ferry between Leesburg and Martinsburg, MD.  Below is the response I received:

Google Maps has been updated to correct the problem you reported. You can see the update here, and if you still see a problem, please tell us more about the issue:
Link to view and/or reopen issue

Report history
Problem ID: BCA2-6E97-C9D2-2B08

Your report: It does not appear that you have White’s Ferry available for routing. Between Leesburg,VA and Martinsburg, MD this is the most direct and fastest route.

–
Thanks for your help,
The Google Maps team

Quite a bit longer than the one month turn around stated in Google’s October 10th email, but better late than never. So enjoy a little bit of history next time you have to travel between Virginia and Maryland.

November 30, 2009   Posted in: Map Commentary  3 Comments

Layar for the iPhone

Today Layar became available for the iPhone.  Previous to this Layar was the only application that made me truly jealous of those that had Android devices.  Described as a “Layar Reality Browser” I think that it is a major step in transferring augmented reality from a toy into a useful tool.  Utilizing GPS and compass it overlays information on top of reality, allowing you to point your phone in a direction and get different types of information depending on the layer selected.

Previous to today the augmented reality applications available in the App Store for the iPhone were pretty simplistic.  These applications also followed the typical pattern within the App Store of provide as few features as you possibly can for 99 cents and hope that you can sell multiple very similar applications.  This was accomplished in augmented reality by providing access to only one dataset usually.  Most of these applications appear to implement ARkit which is an Open Source Library for Augmented Reality, this video is a fairly good representation of this toolkit.  Nothing against ARkit itself, it is great that someone developed it, it is available and open source.  I think the intent should be for people to expand upon and improve it, not just slap their data in there are sell it for whatever they can get.

Now with Layar available this really changes things, it is smoother than a default ARkit implementation.  It also allows developers to create layers instead of creating simple applications around their data, similar to what can be done with KML in Google Earth.  The data and the application are seperated which allows for greater data sharing.

Instead of being responsible for the entire application developers just have to define what the information looks like and provide a feed to the data.

Layar Service Architecture Diagram

Layar Service Architecture Diagram

According to their site currently 155 layers are available and both Layar and the layers are free.  My first question when I started looking at Layar’s site was “what is the business model, how do they intend to make money?”  According to the FAQs: “We foresee several possible sources of income for Layar. Current sources include: integration fees, licensing fees, sponsoring and hosting/maintenance fees. In the near future there will also be opportunities with premium content layers and advertising.”  I’ll be interested to see how that works, but as far as the pure technology this is a great step forward for AR.

If you don’t have a device that can utilize Layar I suggest you get one, otherwise here is a glimpse of what it is capable.


Layar Demonstration Video

October 14, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: augmented reality  One Comment

Update to my Google Maps Error Report

I received notification from Google today that I was right.  We’ll see when the update actually occurs:

Hi Kate,
Your Google Maps problem report has been reviewed, and you were right! We’ll update the map within a month and email you when you can see the change.

Report history
Problem ID: 0xbca26e97c9d22b08

Your report: It does not appear that you have White’s Ferry available for routing. Between Leesburg,VA and Martinsburg, MD this is the most direct and fastest route.

–
Thanks for your help,
The Google Maps team

October 10, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: routing  One Comment

Routing with the new Google Maps Data

I spent some time look around Google Maps since they stopped using Teleatlas in the United States this week.  Essentially I poked around looking for errors that are usually in the street vendor data.  Mostly these are minor errors such as a single line segment misspelled.   The problems usually appear to have originated with the original TIGER street data and never been repaired.

For the areas I’m familiar with the data looks good.  There has been lots of conjecture as to where all the data was sourced.  I suspect at least in Loudoun County where I live the source is the local government, that is unless the occasional segment errors were fixed by Google.  The one error I did find was an edge case within the routing.

White’s Ferry is a small ferry line just north of Leesburg, Virginia.  White’s Ferry is supposed to be the late cable operated ferry on the East Coast, for a little historic background and to see it in action Lonely Planet has a good video clip.  It is the fastest way across the Potomac to rural Maryland on the otherside.  When I lived in Leesburg I occasionally used it when traveling to suburban Maryland such as Rockville because it took the same amount of time and didn’t require any driving on the Beltway.  I’m fairly sure that previously if you routed it would take you across White’s Ferry.  I ran the route through a couple routing websites to compare results.

On Google it takes you up and around across a more northern bridge which is a much slower route in this situation.  Bing Maps routes through the ferry, as does MapQuest.  Yahoo goes up and around across the bridge the same way Google does.  Potentially Yahoo could be a routing engine problem because their tiles say they are sourcing NAVTEQ data and on NAVTEQ’s site you can successfully route from Leesburg to Martinsburg across the ferry (note:  I could not figure out an easy way to link directly to the NAVTEQ route here).

I checked other ferry lines and it appears Google can do the multi-modal routing, but the ferry information is just missing for White’s Ferry.  As an experiment I have reported the missing ferry and requested notification when it is fixed.  You can be sure that I’ll report back here when I get a response.

While performing this exercise I checked OpenStreetMap to make sure the ferry was already available on the map there.  Routing doesn’t work so well in the routing service I used it took an even longer route to go been Leesburg and Martinsburg. At least with YourNavigation.org you can export the route data to GPX and use it in whatever device you like.  If I’m going to use my local knowledge to repair map data I want it back to use however I like.  You can report bugs in the Google map data, but you can’t export it to GPX like you can with the OpenStreetMap data.

October 8, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Map Commentary, OSM, routing  5 Comments

Action Script on the iPhone Good News for GeoNerds?

I’m somewhat interested to see what comes out of Adobe’s announcement this week of the ability to build iPhone applications with ActionScript.  This isn’t actual Flash support on the iPhone but somewhat intriguing anyway.  There are many businesses that utilize Flash for the mapping portion of their site such as UMapper and my employer’s site GeoCommons, Google Maps even has a Flash API.  My favorite project that utilizes Flash is Ohio is a Piano.

By allowing developers to write applications in ActionScript will allow those already mapping in Flash today to build iPhone Apps more quickly and easily.  Potentially those developers may have already existing components they can now utilize in their iPhone applications as well.

I will be interested to see how well compiling ActionScript down to native iPhone code works, but I believe we will see increased compelling iPhone mapping applications to come with this new option.

October 6, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: mobile mapping  One Comment

WhereCampPDX Locative Games Day

Sunday at WhereCampPDX was Locative Games. I played PacManhattan and did some geocaching.  I had heard of PacManhattan before, but playing is believing.  Essentially it is PacMan, but played in the real world with real people as both PacMan and the ghosts.  All of the ghosts wore rain ponchos to look more ghostlike.  Below is me playing Clyde.

Kate wearing a poncho playing Cylde the Ghost

Image Courtesy of Spinnerin's Flickr Stream

Apparently last year the game was played by calling back to homebase to update your position.  This year there was an web application that updated everyone’s location utilizes the javascript geolocation API in the phone.  The game works the same as regular PacMan, but PacMan picks up virtual pellets which disappear from his screen as he passes them.  There were some technical glitches with the iPhone updating location, but it was still a lot of fun.

The best part of the game was when we were walking to the starting corral.  Everyone was wearing a poncho despite the perfect weather and staring down at their phone.  We walked by a guy who tried to put his amusement into words, but just burst out laughing.

In the afternoon we did some geocaching.  Apparently standard geocaching latitude and longitude format is Degrees:Decimal Minutes, the iPhone applications most of us had didn’t support that format.  The two methods people used to make use of the points were either convert the locations to Decimal Degrees or download free iPhone apps until they found one that supported the format.  My geocaching partner Reid Beels and I opted to download iPhone apps until we found one that would work.  We settled on MotionX GPS Lite, which had an odd mix of features for a free app, I can only imagine what extra features the paid version has.  The free version had multiple map views and even iPod controls within it.  The one feature that was limited was that you could only save 3 waypoints.  Once we resolved the location format issues we were on our way and managed to come in second place.  For our efforts we won a compass, some travel bugs and a geocaching patch.  A travel bug is something trackable that moved from cache to cache.

Location games were a great followup to the hacking and sessions of the day before.  WhereCampPDX was one of the best unconferences I’ve ever attended.  It was well organized without being too controlled with a great a mix of people. Thanks everyone who organized as well as attended, it was an enjoyable time.

October 5, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: unconferences  2 Comments

WhereCampPDX Unconference Session Day Summary

Yesterday was the unconference session portion of WhereCampPDX.  Meaning that there were sessions.  I lead a discussion on OpenStreetMap in the United States.  It was the first time people have worded questions to me in the form of “What does the OpenStreetMap think about….”  Getting across the free flowing community was somewhat difficult to explain for some reason, even with the Wikipedia parallel.  A lot of interesting ideas came out of the session though, such as new renders for people that live or spend a lot of time outside.  A potential rending of places with external outlets, water and places to sleep for example.  There was also some interest in getting a two way data flow between government and OSM.  In Washington D.C. we have been discussing how that model could potentially work and it appears that other governments might forward once there are some sample models out there.

In addition to leading a session I also attended an assortment of sessions:

  • Geomena which is an open-source/open-data base of Wifi locations.
  • Utilizing Locative Technologies to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse
  • Virtual Geocaching and Games
  • Strange Maps
  • Foursquare Hacking Discussion (planning to utilize the Foursquare api for evening hacking)

All of these sessions were really enjoyable.  Next week I think I’m going to give the “Utilizing Locative Technologies to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse” its own update, because I can’t fit all the zombie goodness in this update.  Geomena really got me thinking about small hardware to collect WiFi locations.  I could potentially just stick a laptop in my car, but I think it would be even better to have something I could carry while on foot.  Since the iPhone battery life is not that great and it can’t have background processes I don’t think it is the ideal tool.  I was thinking perhaps an Android phone without having cellular service.

The Virtual Geocaching and Games was a fun session.  As an XKCD fan and geonerd I was somewhat surprised I had never heard of geohashing.  Geohashing essentially calculates a random place for people to meet.  The official meetups are 4pm every Saturday at you whole number Latitude and Longitude with the random calculator determining the decimal.  Mine graticule would be 38,-77.  Washington D.C. seems somewhat quiet in the geohashing realm, but I’d like to try to do it one day.

The Strange Maps discussion was somewhat based on the Strange Maps Blog.  I think sessions where people just mention things they’ve seen revolving around a specific topic are always fun.  I read Strange Maps but not every post and there were also some maps mentioned that were not in there.  It was the session that people didn’t want to end.

In addition to the sessions there was also a keynote and an unpanel.  James Fee gave the keynote and discussed “Data Interoperability in the GeoWeb.”  He’s always a geocrowd-pleaser and it was a good talk.  What I took away from it was easy to access data for the Cybernun and Spatialite for the professionals.  The unpanel was something I haven’t experienced before, just a general discussion with a panel regarding various topics in geo.  There were representatives from GIS, art, government and neocartography to stereotype a few.  I took a short Qik Video of the Unpanel, which is a good glimpse of what it was about.

Today there are locative games which I’m excited about, being a new realm for me to play in the style of meet somewhere and play a locative game.

October 4, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: unconferences  4 Comments