The Standby Task Force

While the Nuclear crisis following the Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami is still capturing everyone attention, I wanted to recall the Libya and Ivory Coast conflits and praise the effort of the civil community to try to help by creating free and open-source maps of these areas.

The Standby Task Force is an Online Volunteer Community for Live Mapping. This initiative is linked to Crisis Mappers (http://www.crisismappers.net/) who usually setup Ushaidi Maps (http://blog.ushahidi.com/) for major humanitarian crisis. If you would like to participate in the effort to help, you should consider visiting the blog of the StandBy Task Force (http://blog.standbytaskforce.com/) as well as the one from HOT, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (http://hot.openstreetmap.org/weblog/).

Here are the starting points to help creating useful and open-source maps :

Japan :
http://www.sinsai.info/ushahidi/ (in Japanese)
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2011_Sendai_earthquake_and_tsunami

Libya :
http://libyacrisismap.net/
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Libya

Ivory Coast :
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Ivory_Coast

Sustainable Development

I have recently found this diagram on the Internet to explain the nature of sustainable development. It is really a nice presentation as it shows that every thing is interwoven and that the society, the economy and the environement should be considered as a whole :

HOT activation after floods in Brazil

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has created an activation for the floods in the North of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil :  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2011_Rio_de_Janeiro_Flooding

YouMapps has published two imagesover the area to enable support remote OSM mappers to contribute to the disaster recovery effort: http://www.youmapps.org/news/brazil-floods-new-spot-imagery-available

Wherever you are, you can join HOT and participate in the recovery effort by mapping on these images with OpenStreetMap tools !

600 Satellite Images to Explore and Share

The website http://www.satellite-images.org presents some amazing satellite images of the Earth taken from the SPOT5 satellite.

It has been developed using Drupal, a very powerful, flexible and Open-Source CMS (Content Management System) and contributed modules. More than 600 images are provided at 1000 x 1000 pixels resolution and are dynamically resized thanks to the ImageCache module. The Taxonomy module enables a interactive exploration through categories, tags and countries links. The FiveStar module enables users to vote for their favorite image in order to promote it to the front page. And finaly the SexyBookmarks module enables sharing of the images with friends over a selection of social networks.

Explore and Share !

AOL and Bing going Open-Source ?

I found quite interesting that the two main keynote speakers at the coming Navigation Strategies USA Conference in San Jose are Steve Coast, Principal Architect at Bing Mobile and Randy Meech, Head of Engineering, Local & Mapping, AOL.

Steve Coast is the founder of OpenStreetMap and CloudMade. He has recently left CloudMade to join Microsoft Bing Mobile and made Bing Aerial Imagery available to OSM mappers.

Randy Meech has been talking at the last OpenStreetMap Conference in Girona, Spain. He announced that MapQuest was testing OSM in its new portals across Europe and that AOL will spend the equivalent of 1 million $ to enhance the OSM mapping and routing of the USA.

A clear indication that OpenSource mapping is not only for geeks and open-source activists but is really breaking its way into the industry ! It is obvious that Open-Source is not woven into the fabrik of AOL and Microsoft. So it will be interesting to see what is coming up and how Open-Source (or rather Open-Data) and the commercial web industry can find mutually beneficial agreements.

Ivory Coast Mapping : New Satellite Imagery

Since several weeks, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has been focusing on enhancing the map of Ivory Coast in fear that the situation might get worse with the current political tension in the country. In particular, the map of Abidjan has been greatly improved in the past weeks. Most of the tracing has been done with Bing aerial imagery since Microsoft recently made it available for OSM tracing, but the problem is that it does not cover the whole area of Abidjan.

To answer this need of data sources other than Bing imagery, Astrium-GEO has also offered SPOT satellite imagery over the region of Abidjan to OpenStreetMap. The accuracy is 5 meters, and a little ground mist is visible. However, linear features like roads can be easily identified. This will be especially useful to map out the North and West of Abidjan.

The source tag to use is "2005 Cnes / Spot Image", and this imagery is allowed in JOSM and Merkaartor but not Potlatch. The license agreement is here : http://www.youmapps.org/licenses/EULA-OSM-en.html

The Wikiproject Ivory Coast, with more details, is here : http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/En:WikiProject_Ivory_Coast as well as the post on the HOT blog : http://hot.openstreetmap.org/weblog/2010/12/ivory-coast-post-electoral-crisis/

OpenStreetMap, MapQuest and BingMaps

During the State of the Map 2010 in Girona, MapQuest announced that they will start supporting OpenStreetMap as well as using the open-source map in their portals. The recent opening of the US portal (http://open.mapquest.com/) completes the previous European versions (http://open.mapquest.fr/ for example).

The interesting point is thatMapQuest also provides an API to integrate some OpenStreetMap magic in your applications as well as a new version of the OpenStreetMap Potlach editor :

http://open.mapquestapi.com/

The latest big news came from Microsoft which has allowed access to its BingMaps aerial imagery in OpenStreetMap editors (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing). This will allow to create new open-source content over places that needs mapping but where fewer mappers are active.

This interesting application provides information about the date of each image at various zoom level of the BingMaps content : http://mvexel.dev.openstreetmap.org/bing/

The final point about all this is the integration of BingMaps (including IGN and DigitalGlobe imagery) in a new version of Potlatch edited by MapQuest enabling volunteers to update the OpenStreetMap data :  http://open.mapquestapi.com/dataedit/index_flash.html?lat=43.5532223109707&lon=1.48675752408545

 

Pretty cool and showing an interesting convergence between commercial companies and the open source community :-)