After the big earthquakes in Nepal in April 25th and May 12th (7.8 and 7.3 magnitude respectively), a lot of infrastructures were damaged. One of the biggest challenges that remained behind the curtain was the availability of a good quality mapping data.
Nepal, as any other developing country, was behind in mapping infrastructures,roads and rural villages. Right after the first earthquake, HOTOSM (Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team)got activated and started dividing prioritizing the tasks via Task Manager. Since then, over 2700 volunteers have volunteered their "mapping hours" and continue to do so. Ryerson University in Toronto also has contributed to this mission through two mapathons on April 27th and May 12th. Here is the link from Professor Claus Rinner at Ryerson University which outlines how to get started:
Kathmandu Living Lab located in Nepal and HOTOSM Task Manager are leading the mapping wave.
If you are interested in volunteering some hours to help map different parts of Nepal that are currently under the priority list, please use following summarized resources:
At the moment of this post (June 16th,2015), following tasks are urgent and are available to new mappers:
From the HOTOSM Task Manager:
#1043
#1047
#1018
1. What is openstreet map:
2.Getting started for Nepal mapping:
3. Things to consider while mapping: GIS Blog by Prof. Claus Rinner
Happy Mapping!
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Google Earth Pro Free now
Google Earth Pro is free now. The news broke out earlier last week and the web has been all over it. For those who have used the GE Pro, you already know what to expect, but if you have not used it before, there are the five key things I found to be very helpful through my experience of using the pro version in the past:
1. High resolution imagery if you need to print something out
2. Easy data import (points, lines or polygons)from ESRI formats (the evergreen (so far?) shape file)
3. Movie making options with the audio and visual options to quickly turn an idea into something
4. Batch geocode (Online versions from the past up to 200 or so records can be left behind...)
5. Little more flexibility than the alternative ArcGIS Explorer which is very popular among the public or non-profits who don't have full-phase web server for internal staff.
There are much more things that you can do with it. Here is the promo directly from Google:
Only issue is that if you have the ESRI shop as your enterprise solution, taking data back and forth to GE might not really workout for the efficient workflow.
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