World Country Polygon Datasets

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The Humanitarian Information Unit (HIU) has released several new datasets that leverage the Office of the Geographer‘s work on mapping International Boundaries. The Large Scale International Boundaries (LSIB) dataset, maintained by the Geographic Information Unit (GIU), is a vector line file that is believed to be the most accurate worldwide (non-Europe, non-US) international boundary vector line file available. The lines reflect U.S. government (USG) policy and thus not necessarily de facto control (cited from metadata attached to files). In September 2011, the HIU first released the boundaries publicly for download. Working with colleagues at DevelopmentSeed after that release, they made some substantial improvements to the underlying data structure that helped lead to this work.

The LSIB dataset is designed for cartographic representation and map production. However, this poses a problem for GIS analysis, because the dataset is only composed of vector lines of terrestrial boundaries between countries. This means they do not contain coastlines, and could not be converted into polygons for GIS analysis. To address this issue, the HIU combined the LSIB dataset with the World Vector Shorelines (1:250,000) dataset. The combination of these two datasets is one of the highest resolution country polygon datasets available. Additionally, the LSIB-WVS polygon file is believed to be the most accurate available dataset for determining island sovereignty. It corrects the numerous island sovereignty mistakes in the original WVS data (cited from metadata attached to files).

Two other modifications were made to the datasets. First, the large cartographic scale of the data also introduces a problem in that the data are too detailed for global scale mapping. Therefore, the HIU also created “generalized” versions of the original LSIB-WVS polygons that are suitable for smaller scale mapping. Second, in order to facilitate the ability to “join” data to the polygons in a GIS, several attributes were added to the database, including Country Name and several ISO 3166-1 Country Codes (ISO Alpha 2, ISO Alpha 3, and ISO Number). After a year of work, the data have been released into the public domain.

All datasets can be downloaded from the HIU Data page or the links below:

LSIB – WVS Country Polygons

High Resolution LSIB-WVS Country Polygons (Americas) :: https://hiu.state.gov/data/Americas_LSIBPolygons_2013March08_HIU_USDoS.zip

High Resolution LSIB-WVS Country Polygons (Africa/Eurasia) :: https://hiu.state.gov/data/EurasiaAfrica_LSIBPolygons_2013March08_HIU_USDoS.zip

Simplified Versions

Simplified Global World Vector Shorelines :: https://hiu.state.gov/data/Global_SimplifiedShoreline_2013March08_HIU_USDoS.zip

Simplified Global Country Polygons :: https://hiu.state.gov/data/Global_LSIBSimplifiedPolygons_2013March08_HIU_USDoS.zip

LSIB Lines

Large Scale International Boundaries (LSIB), AFRICA and the AMERICAS :: https://hiu.state.gov/data/AFRICAandAMERICAS_LSIB4b_2012Sep04_USDoS_HIU.zip

Large Scale International Boundaries (LSIB), EURASIA :: https://hiu.state.gov/data/EURASIA_LSIB4b_2012Sep04_USDoS_HIU.zip

Cartographic Guidance

Note, both the polygon and line datasets are useful for cartographic representation. This is due to the variety of different boundary classifications that are in the LSIB. Below is a subset from the metadata attached to the datasets that describes USG cartographic representation of the boundary lines.

From the LSIB lines metadata:
The “Label” attribute field provides a name for any line requiring non-standard depiction, such as “1949 Armistice Line” or “DMZ”

The “Rank” attribute categorizes lines into one of three categories:
a) A rank of “1” (includes most of the 320 international boundaries) for those which the USG considers “full international boundaries.”
b) A rank of “3” for other lines of international separation. Most are considered by the US government to be in dispute.
c) A rank of “7” for other lines of separation such as DMZ’s, No-Mans Land (Israel), UNDOF zone lines (Golan Hts.), Sudan’s Abyei, and for the US Naval Base Guantanamo Bay on Cuba.

Any line with a rank of “3” or “7” is to be dotted or dashed differently and in a manner visually subordinate to the normal rank “1” lines.

Additional information about how the LSIB dataset is produced, and the processes that went into the production of the new datasets are included in the metadata.

And for more information about the Office of the Geographer, see the article from State Magazine below:

State Magazine (March 2009) Office of the Geographer

Article about the Office of the Geographer from State Magazine in March 2009

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The Disruptive Potential of GIS 2.0

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‘Disruption is a theory: a conceptual model of cause and effect that makes it possible to better predict the outcomes of competitive battles in different circumstances’ — The Innovators Solution (Christensen, Raynor, 2003, 55)

My PhD dissertation at the University of Kansas is entitled “The Disruptive Potential of GIS 2.0: An application in the humanitarian domain”. The research involves several interrelated philosophical, technological, and methodological components, but at its core, it is about building a new way to harness the power of geographic analysis. In short, the idea is to show how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has evolved into something different than it was before, explore the dynamics of that evolution, then build new tools and methods that capitalize on those dynamics.

The foundation of the argument is that a new generation of digital geographic tools, defined here as GIS 2.0, have completely changed how core GIS processes are implemented. While the core functions of a GIS remain the same — the creation, storage, analysis, visualization, and dissemination of geographic data (Clarke, 2001) — the number of software packages capable of implementing spatial functions and the distribution capacity of the Internet have fundamentally changed the desktop GIS paradigm. Driving GIS 2.0 is a converging set of technology trends including open source software, decreasing computation costs, ubiquitous data networks, mobile phones, location-based services, spatial database, and cloud computing.The most significant, open source software, has dramatically expanded access to geographic data and spatial analysis by lowering the barrier to entry into geographic computing. This expansion is leading to a new set of business models and organizations built around geographic data and analysis. Understanding how and why these trends converged, and what it means for the future, requires a conceptual framework that embeds the ideas of the Open Source Paradigm Shift (O'Reilly, 2005) and Commons-based Peer Production (Benkler, 2002) within the larger context of Disruptive Innovation Theory (Christensen, Raynor, 2003).

While there is a philosophical element to this argument, the goal of the dissertation is to utilize the insights provided by disruptive innovation theory to build geographic systems and processes that can actually make a difference in how the humanitarian community responds to a complex emergency. It has been long recognized that geographic analysis can benefit the coordination and response to complex emergencies (Wood, 2000)(Kelmelis, Schwartz, Christian, Crawford, King, 2006)(National Research Council, 2007), yet the deployment of GIS has been hampered by a set of issues related to cost, training, data quality, and data collection standards (Verjee, 2007). Using GIS 2.0 concepts there is an opportunity to overcome these issues, but doing so requires new technological and methodological approaches. With utility as a goal, the research is structured around general three sections:

GIS 2.0 Philosophy: Exploring the fundamental reorganization of GIS processes, and building a conceptual model, based on disruptive innovation theory, for explaining that evolution and predicting future changes
GIS 2.0 Technology: Utilizing GIS 2.0 concepts build the “CyberGIS”, a geographic computing infrastructure constructed entirely from free and open source software
GIS 2.0 Methodology: Leverage the CyberGIS and GIS 2.0 concepts to build the “Imagery to the Crowd” process, a new methodology for crowdsourcing geographic data that can be deployed in a range of humanitarian applications

In the next series of posts I will explore each of the points above. My goal is to complete the dissertation in the coming months and I want to use this blog as a staging ground for drafts, chapters, and articles that can be submitted to my committee. As such they will likely be a bit rough. I am a perfectionist in my writing, which only serves to completely slow down my productivity, so hopefully this will force me to “release early and often.”

The core arguments of GIS 2.0 were originally conceived during 2006-2008, so they are a bit dated now. At the time there was really only anecdotal evidence to support the argument that the same Web 2.0 forces (O'Reilly, 2007) that built Wikipedia and disrupted the encyclopedia market were going to impact GIS. However, with the continued rise of FOSS4G, OpenStreetMap, and now the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), it feels almost redundant to be making this argument now. Additionally, from the technology perspective there are lots of individuals and groups out there doing more cutting edge work than I ever will, but I hope the combination of philosophical approach and actual implementation can be a contribution to the discipline of geography — and more importantly, help the humanitarian community be more effective.

As always, constructive comments are welcome.

Benkler, Y. (2002). Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and “The Nature of the Firm”. Yale Law Journal, 112(3), 369–446.

Christensen, C. M., & Raynor, M. E. (2003). The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing.

Clarke, K. C. (2001). Getting started with geographic information systems (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall.

Kelmelis, J. A. ., Schwartz, L., Christian, C., Crawford, M., & King, D. (2006). Use of Geographic Information in Response to the Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake and Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 72, 862–876.

National Research Council. (2007). Successful response starts with a map: improving geospatial support for disaster management. Washington, D.C: National Academies Press.

O’Reilly, T. (2007). What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Communications & Strategies, 1, 17. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1008839

O’Reilly, T. (2005). The Open Source Paradigm Shift. In J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. A. Hissam, & K. R. Lakhani (Eds.), Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (pp. 461–481). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Verjee, F. (2007). An assessment of the utility of GIS-based analysis to support the coordination of humanitarian assistance (Dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Retrieved from http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3297449

Wood, W. B. (2000). Complex emergency response planning and coordination: Potential GIS applications. Geopolitics, 5(1), 19–36. doi:10.1080/14650040008407665

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USGIF Achievement Award

7 Replies

One of the interesting things about the “Imagery to the Crowd” projects has been the positive feedback we have received from a range of different communities. Ultimately we built the process from a belief that free and open geographic data could support the effective provision of humanitarian assistance, and that the power of open source software and organizations were the key to doing this efficiently.

Our goal with Imagery to the Crowd is to provide a catalyst, in the form of commercial high-resolution satellite imagery, to enable the volunteer mapping community to produce data in areas experiencing (or in risk of) a complex emergency. In many ways I thought of this process as trying to link the “cognitive surplus” of the crowd (Shirky, 2011) with the purchasing power of the United States Government, to help humanitarian and development organizations harness the power of geography to do what they already do better.

Somewhat surprisingly, a community outside of the humanitarian sector recognized the potential impact of this process, and the HIU was awarded the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) Government Achievement Award 2012 (Press Release, Symposium Daily pdf, Video page). The award was presented at the GeoInt Symposium in Orlando, FL (Oct 7-14 2012). Below is a video of the awards presentation, and includes the Academic and Industry Division winners from this year. The section on the HIU begins around the 7:25 mark.

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At the conference I also was on a panel in a “GeoInt Forward” session focused on open source software. This panel was actually the best part of the conference. Typically the first day of the GeoInt Symposium is reserved for the golf event, but this year the organizers included an additional day of panel sessions. In general these sessions were very well attended, and with a full-house of approximately 250 people the session on Open Source Software exceeded my expectations. The session description and other panelists are listed below, and it is clear the defense and intelligence perspective that is GeoInt, but it was an interesting group doing work across a range of different applications. I tried to provide a bit of balance and discussed the philosphical approach to open source, and its potential as an organizing principle for organizations. The Imagery to the Crowd project is built on an a cloud-hosted open source geographic computing infrastructure, so I could speak to the reality of this system. It seems that the coming budget austerity has generated significant interest in open source, and now could be golden opportunity.

From the conference proceedings:
“Open Source Software (OSS) has moved from being a backroom, developers-only domain to a frontline component inside key military capabilities. OSS isn’t doing everything—yet—but it is slowly commoditizing key strategic parts of geospatial infrastructure, from operating systems to databases to applications. In this session, key government program managers will discuss where and how they see OSS moving to solve warfighter needs, as well as assess the gaps in OSS investment and capabilities.”

Moderator – John Scott, Senior Systems Engineer & Open Tech Lead, RadiantBlue
Panelists
• John Snevely, DCGS Enterprise Steering Group Chair
• Col Stephen Hoogasian, U.S. Air Force, Program Manager, NRO
• Keith Barber, Senior Advisor, Agile Acquisition Strategic Initiative, NGA
• John Marshall, Chief Technology Officer, J2, Joint Staff
• Dan Risacher, Developer Advocate, Office of the Chief Information Officer, DoD
• Josh Campbell, GIS Architect, Office of the Geographer & Global Issues, State Department

Reference Cited:

Shirky, C. (2011). Cognitive surplus : how technology makes consumers into collaborators. New York: Penguin Books.

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Imagery to the Crowd, ICCM 2012

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Here is my ignite talk on the “Imagery to the Crowd” project from the International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2012). I’ve attended each of the four ICCM conferences (Cleveland, Boston, Geneva, Washington DC). They have been a great way to understand the organizations that comprise the humanitarian community, and more importantly, meet the individuals who power those organizations. It was exciting to present on our work at the HIU, and contribute back to the Crisis Mapping community.

All of the Ignite talk videos are available at the Crisis Mappers Website (lineup .pdf) and collectively they represent a solid cross-section of the field. At the macro-level, I believe the story continues to be about the integration of these new tools and methodologies into established humanitarian practices. The toolkits are stabilizing (crowdsourcing, structured data collection using SMS, volunteer networks, open geographic data and mapping, social media data mining) and are being adopted by the major humanitarian organizations. While I am partial towards crowdsource mapping, the Digital Humanitarian Network and the UN OCHA Humanitarian eXchange Language (HXL) are two other exciting projects.

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Geography jobs at the U.S. Department of State

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Update: The developer position has been filled, the Analyst position is still open
(4 March 2013)

The Jobs

Available immediately, the U.S Department of State is looking to fill two positions related to geographic analysis and geographic programming. The Office of eDiplomacy, the State Department’s knowledge management gurus, want to build a first-rate geographic application development team. The two-person team will work with DoS bureaus to understand their workflows, leverage the geographic components of their data, and build custom geographic applications to help them. The team will be composed of one GIS applications developer, and one GIS analyst. Each position will require a substantial overlap in skills, meaning the developer must understand GIS analysis and the analyst will have to have some programming experience.

The Backstory

Over the past two years I have been working as the GIS Architect at the Humanitarian Information Unit, a division of the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues, Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. Department of State.

In that capacity, I started a project to build a completely open source geographic computing infrastructure focused on humanitarian applications. Called the CyberGIS, this project is built exclusively from open source geographic technology including, PostGIS/PostgreSQL, GeoServer, TileCache, OpenLayers, and TileMill, along with the standard Ubuntu, Apache, Tomcat, jQuery components, and we host our production environment in Amazon Web Services. Using the term CyberGIS was intentional and intended to place the project inline with on-going efforts in the academic community to unite the worlds of geographic information science and cyberinfrastructure.

We have used this infrastructure to build several HIU geographic web applications, including the Imagery to the Crowd projects. These award winning projects are just the beginning for the CyberGIS at the HIU, we have several applications under development that we hope to unveil publicly in the coming months. The success of the HIU CyberGIS has raised the attention of geography in the Department, and the fact that eDiplomacy is building this development team is a huge step in expanding the power of Geography to the entire State Department. Two years ago I could not have expected that we could move this far this fast, and now we have an opportunity to fundamentally influence how the Department operates.

The Ask

If you have serious GIS analysis and open source geographic developer skills and want to be part of a geographic revolution, then I encourage you to apply. We need forward leaning, capable folks who fundamentally understand spatial analysis and geographic technololgy. You must be willing to work hard and be leaders in showing how geographic data and analysis can improve American diplomacy. This is a unique moment and we need the right team.

The main Careers page on the ActioNet website is here

The GIS Business Analyst position here

The GIS Developer position here

U.S. Department of State

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U.S. Department of State 38.894607, -77.048439 Geography Jobs Here

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Unifying Illustrator, TileMill / CartoCSS, and GeoServer

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With the release of TileMill 0.10.0, there are a series of new compositing operations available within the CartoCSS language and rendering engine. A brief review of these features seems to open up a world of new potential.

However, I have a problem. I work in an organization where our primary product is a hard-copy map. As we evolve our product line, our challenge is to produce digital, interactive, web-enabled versions of our hard-copy map content and maintain a high-level of cartographic goodness. Our cartographic team works in Adobe Illustrator, and are quite proficient in it.

The problem we face is having to do cartographic work twice in order to switch between Illustrator and the Web. There has to be a better way. We are currently using TileMill for a significant amount of our web rendering, but also intend to transition to GeoServer. This means we have .AI, CartoCSS and .SLD in the mix.

We need to keep Illustrator as our foundation for creating content, so what is the best option to extend to the web? First is the problem of converting from .AI to CartoCSS, specifically the conversion of graphic styles for each Illustrator layer to its CartoCSS equivalent. I’ve never heard of a converter tool for this and am interested to know if anyone (@opengeo @ortelius @mapbox @ericg @tmcw @springmeyer @kelso @mattpriour…anyone at Adobe) has an idea if it is feasible or the amount of effort it would take.

Second is the problem of having to convert .AI to both CartoCSS for TileMill and SLD for GeoServer. The best option would be to have GeoServer consume CartoCSS natively, that way offline tiles and web services could maintain the same cartographic styling.

I posed similar questions on Twitter to @cageyjames and @spara, and @spara’s reply got me thinking whether I was looking at this question the wrong way. Is this too old school to be considering tools like this, so I wanted to know if anyone else had been thinking about it.

Thankfully @mattpriour replied that work was already being planned at OpenGeo to implement CartoCSS for GeoServer. And @godwinsgo also replied that GeoServer already has some form of CSS style rendering. So it looks like the CartoCSS in GeoServer has a chance of being completed, that just leaves the .AI to CartoCSS conversion.

Anyone have any thoughts?

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OpenStreetMap Animations

Uganda mapping project

1 Reply

The Humanitarian Information Unit has for the second time worked with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to deliver high resolution commercial satellite imagery to the crowd. For this project we helped support the American Red Cross with a disaster risk reduction project focused on the citites of Gulu and Lira in northwest Uganda. Details of the project can be found on the Red Cross blog, “We Start With A Good Map” and the recent Red Cross news article “New Mapping Technologies for the Developing World.” One exciting element of this project is that ARC staff are working directly with locals in country on the project and helping to provide additional local knowledge to the map.

The HIU tasked, processed, and served the imagery using its CyberGIS computing infrastructure (more on this coming). The imagery services have been running for a couple weeks and the mapping results are quite stunning. The amount of detail in Gulu surprises me every time I look at it, especially the trees, huts, and buildings. The maps below are interactive and can be used to zoom and pan around the OpenStreetMap data. Details on how to help with the mapping task, or any other mapping task, can be found at the OSM Tasking Server.

Gulu, Uganda

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Gulu, Uganda 2.773479, 32.304783 Imagery to the Crowd Project: Gulu, Uganda See the OSM Tasking Manager for details: http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/50 Uganda Mapping Project: DisruptiveGeo blog

Lira appears to be a smaller town, with less overall mapping, but the building mapping is equally detailed.

Lira, Uganda

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Lira, Uganda 2.248187, 32.896156 Imagery to the Crowd Project: Lira, Uganda See the OSM Tasking Manager for more details: http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/51 Uganda Mapping Project: DisruptiveGeo blog

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Imagery to the Crowd…early results

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We have been busy reviewing the results of the Camp Roberts / Relief 12-3 mapping experiment for the Horn of Africa. In this phase of the project, the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community was provided short-term access to high resolution commercial satellite imagery over two large collections of refugee camps in Ethiopia (Dollo Ado) and Kenya (Dadaab). The goal was to map the roads and footpaths in 10 refugee camps, that contain a population over 600,000 people, in 48 hours. A more detailed numerical analysis of the data will follow, but from a qualitative perspective the results are amazing. Below are examples taken from one specific camp, the Bokolmanyo camp in Ethiopia, and links to each of the 10 camps mapped in the experiment.

Bokolmanyo before the mapping experiment

Bokolmanyo refugee camp in the OSM database on 20 May 2012

Bokolmanyo refugee camp in the OSM database on 28 May 2012

The ‘Dollo Ado’ refugee camp in Ethiopia is actually composed of 5 individual camps. These camps literally did not exist in OSM before the experiment began. The latest population estimates for the camps report that in total there are 151,972 individuals / 36,721 households living in the Dollo Ado camps (from the UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa, and specifically the 22 May 2012 Dollo Ado population statistical report).

Dollo Ado Refugee Camps

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Bokolmanyo: 4.549560, 41.539478

Melkadida: 4.522779, 41.720324

Kobe: 4.481878, 41.742554

Helawein: 4.368492, 41.861429

Buramino: 4.303960, 41.915073

	Bokolmanyo Bokolmanyo - 39,196 individuals - 9,815 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa 22 May 2012 Dollo Ado population statistical report
	Melkadida Melkadida - 40,621 individuals - 9,303 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa 22 May 2012 Dollo Ado population statistical report
	Kobe Kobe - 26,695 individuals - 6,370 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa 22 May 2012 Dollo Ado population statistical report
	Helawein Helawein - 26,463 individuals - 6,400 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa 22 May 2012 Dollo Ado population statistical report
	Buramino Buramino - 18,997 individuals - 4,833 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa 22 May 2012 Dollo Ado population statistical report

Similarly, the ‘Dadaab’ camp in Kenya is also composed 5 individual camps with a total of 465,334 individuals living there (UNHCR 20 May 2012 Dadaab population statistical report). These camps have been in operation longer than Dollo Ado, and contains 3 times more people. At the beginning of the experiment 3 of these camps had some map data in OSM, however the newer Ifo 2 and Kambioos camps were non-existent. All camps had significant improvements.

Dadaab Refugee Camps

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Dagahaley: 0.193290, 40.286608

Ifo 2: 0.148573, 40.318623

Ifo: 0.119047, 40.315189

Hagadera: 0.009999, 40.370765

Kambioos: -0.043087, 40.370121

	Dagahaley Dagahaley - 123,493 individuals - 36,041 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa UNHCR 20 May 2012 Dadaab population statistical report
	Ifo 2 Ifo 2 - 73,019 individuals - 18,723 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa UNHCR 20 May 2012 Dadaab population statistical report
	Ifo Ifo - 117,146 individuals - 38,365 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa UNHCR 20 May 2012 Dadaab population statistical report
	Hagadera Hagadera - 138,269 individuals - 43,878 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa UNHCR 20 May 2012 Dadaab population statistical report
	Kambioos Kambioos - 13,407 individuals - 2,813 households (OSM Tasking Server) Sources: UNHCR data portal for the Horn of Africa UNHCR 20 May 2012 Dadaab population statistical report

These impressive results are due to the hard work of a wide range of people, and I would like to thank several of them: first is the OSM volunteers who donated their time and energy to mapping these camps – you literally helped put 600,000 people on the map; the HIU technology team who went above and beyond in getting the tech stack running; the State Department, Office of the Geographer (Lee Schwartz and Benson Wilder) – USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (Chad Blevins) – USG partners (Katie Baucom and Nat Woolpert) who were key to keeping the process moving; John Crowley for providing constant energy and opening the Camp Roberts venue as a place to work; Kate Chapman and Schuyler Earl from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team for advising on the process and making modifications to the tasking server to accommodate NextView; the UN’s Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) for its early help with image processing and serving.

Let’s hope this is just the beginning. I’ll be posting the results of the numerical analysis here, as well as details on the actual request workflow and technological implementation.

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Imagery to the crowd…phase 1

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Over the past year, the Humanitarian Information Unit (HIU) at the U.S. State Department has been working with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) to publish current high-resolution commercial satellite imagery during humanitarian emergencies. The imagery is used to map the affected areas, and provide a common framework for governments and aid agencies to work from. All of the map data is stored in the OpenStreetMap database (http://osm.org ), under a license that ensures the data is freely available and open for a range of uses.

This work began as part of the RELIEF Exercises 11-4 at Camp Roberts in August 2011, and focused primarily on the legal and policy issues associated with sharing imagery. Now with RELIEF Exercise 12-3 happening in DC this week, the project is moving into its first technical implementation. As a proof of concept, the HIU is publishing imagery for the refugee camps in the Horn of Africa, and making the imagery available to the volunteer mapping community. The goal is to produce detailed vector data for the refugee camps, including roads and footpaths in and around the camps. There are tens of thousands of refugees living in these camps who are victims of famine and conflict, and these data can be used to improve planning for humanitarian assistance.

How to help: We are going to open access to the imagery on Monday 21 May 2012. We would like to spend two 24-hour periods tracing the areas of interest, which will include 11 refugee sites. All work will be done through the HOT Tasking Manager (http://tasks.hotosm.org), a microtasking platform that will split up the image tracing into ‘tiles’ that will require approximately 30-45 minutes to map.

Accomplishing this task will require that volunteers become familiar with OpenStreetMap and the basic concepts of mapping. But, don’t worry, there are plenty of resources out there to help. For more information on the OpenStreetMap (OSM) process, see the “Beginning OpenStreetMap Tutorial” available from the LearnOSM website (http://learnOSM.org), specifically Chapters 1,2,3,6. For more information on HOT’s work in Somalia see the HOT Somalia project page, and other HOT related materials on the HOT wiki.

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Disruptive Geo

Exploring the disruptive potential of geography

World Country Polygon Datasets

All datasets can be downloaded from the HIU Data page or the links below:

LSIB – WVS Country Polygons

Simplified Versions

LSIB Lines

Cartographic Guidance

The Disruptive Potential of GIS 2.0

USGIF Achievement Award

Imagery to the Crowd, ICCM 2012

Geography jobs at the U.S. Department of State

Update: The developer position has been filled, the Analyst position is still open
(4 March 2013)

The Jobs

The Ask

Unifying Illustrator, TileMill / CartoCSS, and GeoServer

OpenStreetMap Animations

Uganda mapping project

Imagery to the Crowd…early results

Imagery to the crowd…phase 1

All datasets can be downloaded from the HIU Data page or the links below:

LSIB – WVS Country Polygons

Simplified Versions

LSIB Lines

Cartographic Guidance

Update: The developer position has been filled, the Analyst position is still open (4 March 2013)

The Jobs

The Ask

Update: The developer position has been filled, the Analyst position is still open
(4 March 2013)