News — 22 August, 2010

HOT Mission 4 to Haiti

Information Kiosk (image courtesy Leonard Doyle)

Nicolas and I are back down in Haiti until the end of August. There was just as much preparation this time, but less fanfare. Being well practiced at the general logistics of our missions we were able to focus more on the actual tasks for this trip. Our focus has changed from general OpenStreetMap training and data collection to focus on mapping within settlements and camps.

HOT is working within the IOM (International Office on Migrations) Communications Department. The goal it to not only put data into OpenStreetMap about the settlements/camps but also have printed map products that the residents can access. This has involved adding additional tags to the HDM (Humanitarian Data Model) as well as custom cartography so the settlement/camp specific information shows up. The printed maps are going to be posted in kiosks along with other community information.

The plan for the map printing is to have a local instance of MapOSMatic. The reason for the local instance is the connectivity isn't always great and so we can have custom cartography. We chose MapOSMatic because it was important for anyone to be able to print out a map, instead of requiring advanced GIS skills. This way once the HOT team returns home OpenStreetMap Haiti and IOM can continue to update the maps within the kiosks.