The Haiti earthquake disaster showed us the incredible contribution of the comunity for creating a detailed map in the area around Port-au-Prince. Apparently this was the initiation for Google to write following tweet:
Google recently promoted their Map Maker tool to gather more community driven data (called volunteered geographic information VGI). They continue their philosophy to become more and more independent from conventional data providers like Teleatlas. Public aware events are used to promote volunteered data production. But in comparison to OpenStreetMap (which is under public license) the data/knowledge produced with Map Maker is transfered to a private company located in the US.
The following video shows the visualisation of the response to the earthquake by the OpenStreetMap community. Within 12 hours the white flashes indicate edits to the map (generally by tracing satellite/aerial photography). Over the following days a large number of additions to the map are made with many roads (green primary, red secondary) added. Also many other features were added such as the blue glowing refugee camps that emerge. A lot of these edits were made possible by a number of satellite and aerial imagery passes in the days after the quake, that were release to the public for tracing and analysis.
OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
What is your opinion on using public aware events for promoting community driven data production?
