I hope that the relief efforts in Haiti are making use of available mapping technology. I understand we had overflights providing imagery quickly after the earthquake, but it is necessary to put the information in a form relief agencies can use.
The talk goes further, however, to point out that maps can help turn land and otehr property owned by poor people into capital that they can leverage for development. Maps have a plethora of other uses, from planning public health campaigns to managing agricultural pest control, to providing better information for site location planning and urban development.
Check out this nice video from TED.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
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2 comments:
From what I have seen on blogosphere, there is a lot of good mapping work being done in Haiti in response to the earthquake. One problem is that many of the roads are unpassable. But yes, road maps and other geographic information can be very valuable in disaster situations.
I like Google map maker. But, some things about it concern me. As far as I can tell, it is still not clear whether any users will be able to use the maps outside of the Google earth or Google map application. I would like to be able to download these maps and input them directly into my geographic information system. This system now allows Google to create a very valuable asset. Anybody can help them draw the roads, essentially amounting to free labor for Google. I am sure they will make good profits on advertising related to these applications. Shouldn't they have an obligation to make the data available for others to use in applications outside of Google earth and maps?
I agree that Google should make maps available for downloading, certainly for disaster relief and other humanitarian purposes.
More fundamentally, think about the drones for remote sensing and massive data processing for battlefield intelligence being developed for military uses. There ought to be an intergovernmental agency holding a full array of devices utilizing this technology that could be sent immediately into disaster zones to provide disaster relief intelligence.
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