Friday, January 16, 2015

International Map Year

According to both the International Cartographic Association (ICA) and the United Nations, it's apparently International Map Year! A very happy International Map Year to everyone.

In the past year, I've been enjoying attending mapping parties thrown by the Humanitarian OSM group and using their Tasking Manager to map areas where geographic data is useful but lacking. The team has done a really impressive job of developing both a friendly, useable tool and a community to use it.

In the coming year, I'm especially excited to see what comes of the Missing Maps Project, an effort to map places where humanitarians anticipate crises but lack the spatial data to respond to them. This is similar to the kind of work that amazing groups like MapAction and CrisisMappers end up doing in the heat of the moment. It'll be interesting to see how the availability of good data during the first few hours and days of a crisis impacts the situation.

Happy new year!