[HOT] The evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OpenStreetMap community

Thu Feb 4 14:13:47 UTC 2021

Wow!!! 😍 Super impressive in-depth research you got there! To go from
crunching raw OSM history files to extracting meaningful information from
regression models to an actionable agenda for improving future humanitarian
OSM initiatives, is no small feat and the analysis pipeline you've put
forward is a huge step towards understanding the status quo and improving
our work as a community. Bravo! 👏👏

I wonder, is there any "wishlist" metadata the HOT tasking manager could
collect on its users that would allow for more interesting angles on the
analysis? Cataloguing which regions users consider themselves as a "local"
comes to mind, as then we could understand how many map features are added
by remote users vs locals

Looking forward to checking out the source code when it's published!
Especially that you went into detail to analyze the type of edits made in
each changeset is really impressive. I for one would love to read a nice
explanatory blog post about pulling off such a herculean feat of data
extraction (I'm curious especially how many hours/days/computing power/€€
the analysis took)

Viva la OSM!
Davey

ps Swaziland changed its official name
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eswatini> to eSwatini in 2018 but no worries

<https://geoDavey.us>
Davey Lovin
m: +1 303 578 9626 <+13035789626>
e: me at geoDavey.us

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 12:32 PM nicolas chavent <nicolas.chavent at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Thanks Benjamin for sharing this article and the wealth of
> resources/thinking that goes with it. I'll pass it to the hot-francophone
> mailing list so that it also reaches (with some help of Deepl-like tools)
> mappers active in these territories.
>
> Excellent day to you and all,
> Be well and stay safe,
> Best, Nicolas
>
> Le jeu. 4 févr. 2021 à 12:47, Benjamin Herfort <herfort at uni-heidelberg.de>
> a écrit :
>
>> Dear Humanitarian OSM Community,
>>
>> today I wanted to share with you some very recent research findings that
>> we've just published in the journal "Scientific Reports". The title of the
>> article is "The evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OpenStreetMap
>> Community" and I can ensure you that we tried really hard to provide a
>> comprehensive and detailed picture on what many of us in this community
>> have been working on for the past decade.
>>
>> This analysis encompasses all humanitarian mapping projects organized
>> through the HOT Tasking Manager <https://tasks.hotosm.org/> since 2012
>> (start of the available data), enabling us — for the first time — to cast a
>> longitudinal perspective on the intersecting effects of mapping efforts,
>> socio-economic, and demographic characteristics.
>>
>> I also wrote a blog post which can give a quick summary of the main
>> findings here:
>>
>> http://k1z.blog.uni-heidelberg.de/2021/02/04/the-evolution-of-humanitarian-mapping-within-the-openstreetmap-community/
>>
>> Here you find the full article:
>> Herfort, B., Lautenbach, S., Porto de Albuquerque, J., Anderson, J.,
>> Zipf, A.The evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OpenStreetMap
>> community <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82404-z>. *Sci Rep* *11,
>> *3037 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-82404-z
>>
>> I hope that our research can be of interest and relevance not only for
>> academics, but for a broader and much more diverse group as the
>> humanitarian OSM community is one and I'm curious to hear about your
>> thoughts and ideas about it. So feel free to get in contact with me in case
>> that there is something not clear or if you would just like to discuss your
>> thoughts and ideas. [image: (smile)]
>>
>> Please note that our insights about humanitarian mapping in OSM only
>> provide an incomplete picture which lacks an on-the-ground perspective and
>> neglects other remote mapping tools, since we considered only the mapping
>> that was organized through the HOT Tasking Manager. For instance,
>> humanitarian mapping that has been organized by local residents on the
>> ground is not considered here. This limitation is accompanied by the fact
>> that our analysis only focused on two types of mapped objects (buildings,
>> highways). As you know mapping in OSM comes with a much greater variety of potential
>> map objects (e.g. health facilities, schools, water points), which can add
>> particular value in comparison to other geographic data sets. We are aware
>> of the fact that our definition of humanitarian mapping is therefore
>> oversimplified and the results must be taken with a grain of salt. In many
>> regions of the world there is no clear distinctive line between
>> humanitarian and non-humanitarian mapping activities as the humanitarian
>> and non-humanitarian OSM communities are not disjoint.
>>
>> For the ones of you that I do not know in person, here a short background
>> on myself and why we did this research:
>> I'm currently doing a PhD at Heidelberg University and are based at the
>> Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology. I got interested in
>> humanitarian mapping in OSM in 2013 when I attended a seminar by João Porto
>> de Albuquerque (who is one of the co-authors of the paper) and the mapping
>> in response to Typhoon Haiyan happened. Since then I've looked into various
>> aspects of mapping in OSM and supported the Missing Maps project with
>> developing MapSwipe, and general OSM analyses and stats. It was really
>> great to see many of you in person at the HOT Summit and State of the Map
>> in Heidelberg in 2019. This research mainly evolved out of these many
>> discussions back then and many small analyses that I've conducted in the
>> following and the again following discussions I had around these with João,
>> Jennings, Sven and Alex. Some parts of it are also visualized on a website,
>> which you can check here: https://humstats.heigit.org
>>
>> Have a nice week,
>>
>> Benni (Herfort)
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>>
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