GIScience HD member and disastermapper Bennie reports:
The 2015 Nepal earthquake that struck Nepal on 25th April with a magnitude of 7.8 destroyed many building completely or in a manner that they can easily be collapsed by aftershocks. Therefore, many people left their homes and slept outside in tent cities and camp sites in open areas of the city. By the impressive efforts of the OpenStreetMap community these camp sites were mapped right after the first post disaster satellite imagery was available (e.g. see HOT Task 1008 for this). All in all, this resulted in more than 18,000 camp sites put on the map all over Nepal.
Nevertheless, information about the location and size of internally displaced persons (IDP) camp sites can only be valuable to people and organisations in the field if it is correct and up-to-date.
For this reason, together with colleagues from the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University we are currently working on a study to assess the quality of IDP camp sites mapping in OpenStreetMap after the 2015 Nepal earthquake. For doing so we created a microtasking application to detect changes in size and structure of IDP camp sites over time.
Since there a quite many IDP camp sites only within Kathmandu, we would be glad if some of you could help us validating the OpenStreetMap data. (Contribute here: http://crowdmap.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/app/shelter_dynamics/)
Of course, we will make our results publicly accessible. Futhermore, we think that the prototype of our crowdsourcing application may help to fasten up the validating process of OpenStreetMap data especially in situation when there are many contributions such as after disaster events. We are looking forward to discuss that in the future and are curious for your ideas.
Have a nice week,
Benni