News — 20 April, 2022
OpenAerialMap v2 Design Kicks Off!
This year HOT joined with Kontur to take a fresh look at OAM and redesign the platform. We will evaluate how OAM could be improved to better support HOT’s vision that everyone has access to high quality map data and use that data responsibly to improve lives and communities. Read the initial findings in this blog and join the user workshops at the end of April.
OpenAerialMap.org (OAM) was built in 2015 to serve as a platform and tools for sharing openly licensed satellite and aerial imagery. For the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and its partners, open imagery has been critical for disaster response and preparedness mapping projects. Those images have traditionally been difficult to share and access because of the large file sizes and technical skills required to publish them online. Since its inception, OAM provides an easy means of contributing to and accessing a large repository of open imagery, with over 11,000 images added. The OAM browser is designed to easily index, visualize and filter images, while the data itself is stored in Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format in the Open Imagery Network, a federated network of highly available imagery buckets from different cloud providers.
OpenAerialMap is the only platform built on open-source software that allows anyone to upload and share aerial imagery of anywhere on Earth. With advances in drone mapping technologies and their proliferation in places where cost and access used to be a limiting factor, there are now massive amounts of images that can be easily made available through OAM. Once uploaded, all imagery becomes instantly accessible via scalable TMS and WMTS services for mapping in OpenStreetMap or for any other use. Since its creation, OAM has been democratizing high resolution Earth observation and promoting the sharing of aerial imagery through open data licenses.
This year HOT joined with Kontur to take a fresh look at OAM and redesign the platform. Using modern, equitable, human-centered design principles, we will evaluate how OAM could be improved to better support HOT’s vision that everyone has access to high quality map data and use that data responsibly to improve lives and communities. The development will build on and integrate emerging standards for geospatial data such as the Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification. A broad range of users and stakeholders will be involved in the design process, to ensure that OAM v2 will result in a modern and accessible platform.
Kontur team has extensive experience in disaster management, geospatial analysis, and geoinformation products development. Its team has business analysts and competent UX designers, who utilize user-centered design processes in the daily work. Kontur and HOT are reaching out to the OAM community to conduct user interviews and workshops to extract user needs and formalize them in requirements ready for development. A conceptual architecture, a map of stakeholders, user personas, prioritized user stories, and storyboards will be created and reviewed with the HOT team. The estimated timeframe for the design is 4 months and will be finished in the middle of June 2022.
An initial set of findings from user interviews is summarized in this document. HOT and Kontur are now organizing workshops to further refine and prioritize user needs and ideas. If you want to participate in the workshops, please sign up through this form by Monday 25th of April. We hope to see you there!!