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 These days in the Internet age, for the Ebola crisis, citizens from
all over the world are donating their time by going online to build
maps for relief workers.
Call it crowd-sourced cartography that can save lives.
Roads or paths to remote villages through deep forest in West
Africa, bridges and river crossings, school buildings that can be
used as temporary clinics, an open field for a helicopter landing -
all these are visible from satellite imagery and provide critical
information for delivering aid.
However, these details never made it onto official maps in Liberia,
Guinea and Sierra Leone - countries too poor to worry about whether
there are accurate Google Maps loaded onto smartphones.
So when the Ebola epidemic erupted earlier this year, Doctors
without Borders, the American Red Cross and other groups on the
ground found that unreliable maps made fighting the spread of the
deadly virus much more difficult.
They could not trace the likely vectors of transmission because they
did not know the patterns of peoples’ daily lives, and they could
not plan effective aid delivery.
Enter the collaborative Ebola project by the Humanitarian
OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).
OpenStreetMap is a project to create a free, open map of the world,
built by volunteers through GPS surveying, aerial imagery, and
public sources of geographic data.
Taking that concept a step further, HOT connects the OpenStreetMap
community with humanitarian players on the ground to fill in the
gaps on maps for disaster and crisis zones.
Around 1,200 volunteers so far have logged onto HOT's website,
clicked on a map quadrant and traced in the rich geographic details
visible from satellites.
A quick tutorial guides volunteers through the work, which is
similar to using a software program like Adobe Photoshop.
By using the satellite imagery to add details like population
density and connecting paths between communities, remote map makers
give humanitarian groups vital tools for planning their ground
campaign in combatting a disease that has claimed more than 2,400
lives.
“They will print out the maps poster sized and pin them on the wall
to plan their work, how to distribute supplies,” said Pierre Beland,
a 67-year-old retired economist living near Montreal who has turned
his computer knowledge to map making.
For Andrew Buck, an unemployed 29-year-old computer scientist who
logs on daily from his home in Fargo, North Dakota, the map work
transports him a continent away.
“You are acutely aware and start to get a sense of being in that
place and learn about how people live, their farms, the fields,
where the kids play soccer, the schools, and connections to the next
village,” Buck said in a telephone interview.
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VOLUNTEERS MAP DISASTER ZONES
Their work began in March after Doctors without Borders, the
non-profit medical corps based in Switzerland, sent a geographer to
Guinea to work alongside epidemiologists, who needed accurate maps
of buildings that could serve as clinics and specialised maps
showing pathways along which the virus could spread.
Audrey Lessard-Fontaine, the group's cartographic liaison, asked
OpenStreetMap to enlist volunteers.
Its worldwide Internet community had experience mapping disasters.
Their first assignment was in January 2010 mapping Port-au-Prince
after the Haiti earthquake destroyed the government offices that
housed its maps.
Nearly four years later, 1,500 OpenStreetMap volunteers from 82
countries mapped flooded homes and what was left standing after
Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the Philippines.
The Ebola crisis is by far its largest project to date.
"The great thing about it is the speed at which areas can be mapped.
Even if we had five staff full-time working on it, we would hardly
be able to reach the speed at which dozens,hundreds of volunteers
manage to map out a zone," said Lessard-Fontaine.
The volunteer cartographers have recorded 7 million data points so
far and still have large swathes undone. By comparison, Typhoon
Haiyan was 4.5 million data entries, and Haiti only 1.3 million,
Buck and Beland said.
Their latest assignment came this week. Doctors Without Borders
needs a detailed street map of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia,
where the outbreak is raging out of control and U.S. President
Barack Obama is sending 3,000 soldiers.
For the cartographers, it’s a way to fight Ebola from their desktops
for which anyone can sign up.
“We’re just a bunch of computer guys on the Internet,” said Buck.
(Reporting by Stella Dawson.; Editing by Alisa Tang)
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