Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Responds In Nepal 25
An anonymous reader writes with news about the efforts of the The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to help in the aftermath of the earthquake in Nepal. The team asks those living in the affected areas to help out by reporting which buildings are damaged, which are still standing, and where fissures and other quake damage is located. Opensource.com has a profile of their efforts which reads: Since the devastating earthquake in Nepal, there have been responses from all over the world from relief agencies, governments, non-profits, and ordinary citizens. One interesting effort has been from the crowdsourced mapping community, especially on OpenStreetMap.org, a free and open web map of the world that anyone can edit (think the Wikipedia of maps.) The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), an NGO that works to train, coordinate, and organize mapping on OpenStreetMap for humanitarian, disaster response, and economic development, has mobilized volunteers from around the world to help map since the Haiti earthquake in 2010.
Donations (Score:2)
Our little group donated $1000 for helicopter fuel. Absolutely NO administrative costs either.
is there a simple android edit/add client? (Score:4, Insightful)
On a slightly related note: I wanted to add minor resources like bike repair stations and water fountains in my city, and figured there MUST be an android app that would make this about as simple as "hold your phone over it for a bit to get an averaged position, now click this and then "water fountain".
Nothing that I could see was remotely this simple? Even the web editor is a nightmare of trying to figure out exactly how to do things...and the wiki didn't help much, either, with poor documentation on the various properties one can assign to an object.
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Have you looked here [openstreetmap.org]?
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So there's eight or ten clients for android that support some sort of editing, which is precisely why I asked. Which of them actually has a usable interface for simply and quickly adding POI's?
I'm not going to go through the trouble of installing almost a dozen clients just to answer this question.
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Then I guess we'll never know.
It looks like the answer is "it's always a pain in the asshole" which is why OSM sucks so bad. I have a dozen hobbies already. Make it easy to add map data or GTFO. Use a typical web-of-trust model to determine which map data gets published automatically.
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Osmand [wordpress.com] supports editing openstreetmap if you install a plugin, it's not the most convenient way since osmand is supposed to be for navigation. You can also use amenity editor [osmsurround.org] which allows you to add stuff from the webbrowser.
But no, just adding a POI is not something openstreetmap excels at, I guess it's something that is prone to abuse (see Google maps).
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There's no need for it to be abused. Just tag each POI with an <unconfirmed> tag and hide them on the map by default (but show them in searches) until they get reported by multiple users.
Re:is there a simple android edit/add client? (Score:4, Informative)
I know that many people use Vespucci on Android http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/... [openstreetmap.org] for mapping. I personally worked a lot with the OsmPad http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/... [openstreetmap.org] for collecting addresses during on the ground survey.
I work with many computer maps. The OSM is one of the best, if not the best.
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This could be helpful (Score:2)
This will be a very useful tool once they have internet access again or for the first time.