OpenStreetMap’s New Micro-Tasking Platform for Satellite Imagery Tracing

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s (HOT) response to Haiti remains one of the most remarkable examples of what’s possible when volunteers, open source software and open data intersect. When the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck on January 12th, 2010, the Google Map of downtown Port-au-Prince was simply too incomplete to be used for humanitarian response. Within days, however, several hundred volunteers from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) commu-nity used satellite imagery to trace roads, shelters and other important features to create the most detailed map of Haiti ever made.

OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

The video animation above shows just how spectacular this initiative was. More than 1.4 million edits were made to the map during the first month following the earthquake. These individual edits are highlighted as bright flashes of light in the video. This detailed map went a long way to supporting the humanitarian community’s response in Haiti. In addition, the map enabled my colleagues and I at The Fletcher School to geo-locate reports from crowdsourced text messages from Mission 4636 on the Ushahidi Haiti Map.

HOT’s response was truly remarkable. They created wiki’s to facilitate mass collaboration such as this page on “What needs to be mapped?” They also used this “OSM Matrix” to depict which areas required more mapping:

The purpose of OSM’s new micro-tasking platform is to streamline mass and rapid collaboration on future satellite image tracing projects. I recently reached out to HOT’s Kate Chapman and Nicolas Chavent to get an overview of their new platform. After logging in using my OSM username and password, I can click through a list of various on-going projects. The one below relates to a very neat HOT project in Indonesia. As you can tell, the region that needs to be mapped on the right-hand side of the screen is divided into a grid.

After I click on “Take a task randomly”, the screen below appears, pointing me to one specific cell in the grid above. I then have the option of opening and editing this cell within JOSM, the standard interface for editing OpenStreetMap. I would then trace all roads and buildings in my square and submit the edit. (I was excited to also see a link to WalkingPapers which allows you to print out and annotate that cell using pen & paper and then digitize the result for import back into OSM).

There’s no doubt that this new Tasking Server will go a long way to coordinate and streamline future live tracing efforts such as for Somalia. For now, the team is mapping Somalia’s road network using their wiki approach. In the future, I hope that the platform will also enable basic feature tagging and back-end triangulation for quality assurance purposes—much like Tomnod. In the meantime, however, it’s important to note that OSM is far more than just a global open source map. OSM’s open data advocacy is imperative for disaster preparedness and response: open data saves lives.