On cartography

Sometimes I learn about something that shakes my view of the world. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense and I feel a bit idiotic that I didn't think of that before but at that particular moment I get all flabbergasted. Last time I had such a moment was when I heard that there are a lot of areas of the world that remain unmapped. And I don't talk about the sub-lakes of Antartica or the Mount Mabu in Mozambique. I am talking about slums and rural areas where people live in.

Tomorrow a project called missing maps is being launched. It is a collaboration of  the Red Cross and Medecins sans Frontiers with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and it's vision is "to put the world's vulnerable people on the map". Data will be collected by volunteers, local and remote, and all maps will be open and free to all, and most importantly open sourced.

Project #699, mapping Ebola Treatment Centers by the Humanitarian OSM team.

It is a simple and ingenious idea and was created by the need of these humanitarian groups to be able to reach the areas where they are needed. Having detailed maps of an area will help with defining the epidemiological characteristics of a disease (like Ebola outbreak in West Africa the last few months or cholera outbreak in Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010) but they are expected to find more applications such as transit planning, waste removal or housing strategy. And they will definitely help the humanitarian help to reach faster the people in need.

The Open Street Map platform has been running since 2004 and thanks to the edits from volunteers a lot of communities acquired detailed maps such as Gueckedou, a town in southern Guinea with an estimated population of 221,715, which initially had 9 roads outlined on a map. Now a much more detailed map with hundreds of roads, buildings and streams is available to all.

A free digital map of  Liberia , thanks to the Humanitarian OSM Team

This map could then be used by different organizations like the global Red Cross network and MSF to create maps specific to their specialty in the treatment of Ebola. For example, the Red Cross volunteers use such maps to find communities where they are providing education on prevention, while MSF uses the maps to create data visualization of the spread of the disease and coordinate field teams.

This is a collective effort to put everyone on the map and, most importantly, with the maps remaining accessible to all!