Highlighting Diverse Collections Archive

Missing Maps is a humanitarian project that preemptively maps parts of the world that are vulnerable to natural disasters, conflicts, and disease epidemics. Missing Maps uses the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) platform intending to be proactive rather than reactive.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) was formed after the success of VGI in response to the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, when mappers from around the world updated maps to aid disaster response. Collaborative mapping helps aid workers identify roads, buildings, and communities in need.

In the past 10 years, the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been used to support humanitarian efforts around the world as well as to fill important data gaps for implementing major development frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OSM community, seeking to understand the spatial and temporal footprint of these large-scale mapping efforts

OpenStreetMap is an open-source collaborative project that transformed online mapping by allowing users to edit and download the maps' underlying geodata. This process also changed humanitarian aid and disaster response, allowing people worldwide to quickly update humanitarian workers' data in the critical moments following catastrophic events. This act of editing maps in response to disasters is called Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI).

This map of Port-Au-Prince and Vicinity was one of the most detailed maps of the area available online when a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010. Within 24 hours volunteers from around the world created a detailed map of the area using satellite images. The map data is open source and available for emergency response and humanitarian aid workers to download.