[OSM-talk] Basic Mapping in Africa

[john whelan]

To me this isn't a question of responding to a particular regional
emergency.

I agree we need input from the locals.  I don't know how best to tackle
this but I suspect there are areas of Africa that have villages that are
not yet mapped and they need to be.  It's identifying them that is the
first problem.  How to tackle mapping them is the second.  What level of
detail do we need?

Thanks for you input.  Hopefully we can flesh something out.

Cheerio John




On Fri, Dec 3, 2021, 16:41 Pierre Béland <pierzenh at yahoo.fr> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> I can talk from my experience coordinating major OSM responses from 2012.
> This is from this experience that we did use tools to detect villages in
> flooded and semi-desertic areas from images and we proposed what is now
> recognized as the https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway_Tag_Africa
>
> While responding to major disasters in Democratic Republic of Congo (2012)
> and North-Mali (2013), we did experience such workflow with
> 1. spot villages / hamlets (ancestor tool of mapswipe)
>
> 2. trace contour of these populated areas - we want a minimal density of
> these urbanised areas and need to fix a minimum of buildings adjacent to
> each other (5-10 buildings should be a minimum).
>
> 3. Try to complete the road / path network, trying to correct road islands
> (not connected to the general road network), structure the network of roads
> / paths and avoid to trace the multitude of paths in sand left by
> livestock, and the multitude of alternative paths when people or cars try
> to contour damage roads at rainy season.
>
> The second problem is to manage such projects and control the quality of
> mapping. As with the Buildings projects,  if too many new mappers
> participate with no control, we endup creating poor quality data that might
> never be corrected later.  And as we have seen with major mapping projects
> since 2015, there are initiators adding multitude of Tasking Manager
> projects, promoting these projects inviting crowdmap participation but with
> no plan, no volunteers mapping training and management.
>
> but I would say that areas in semi-desertic areas with a lot of isolated
> villages are often undermapped and should be prioritized.  But please let's
> avoid replacing a Blank map by bad quality mapping.
>
> And not dozens of projects should be started simultaneously and never
> validated correctly. We need to redefine Validation of TM projects since
> too often we see bad quality data even after validators passed over the
> data.
>
> It would be important that OSM communties from Africa express their
> opinion on this.
>
> Pierre
>
>
> Le vendredi 3 décembre 2021, 16 h 08 min 38 s UTC−5, John Whelan <
> jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
>
> It would appear that it would be advantageous to get COVID vaccines into
> Africa even if it is simply to reduce the risk of mutations that come
> back to the rest of the world.
>
> There are multiple parts to this, one is money for vaccines, another is
> someone to perform the vaccination, and finally getting the vaccines to
> the population.  If you don't know where they are you can't vaccinate
> them.  OSM can help here.
>
> Mapping every building as HOT seems to be doing isn't practical in a
> short time frame but what might be possible is to map the size of the
> villages and major highways.
>
> Do we have any idea which countries should be prioritized for basic
> mapping?
>
> Thanks John
>
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