Tag: HOT

  • Workshop with Wikimedia on Disaster Management: Connecting Humanitarian Actors, Research and Digital Volunteer Communities

    Over the last couple of years a new group of actors has become increasingly important to support disaster management – digital volunteers. They support disaster responses and humanitarian activities from all over the world. Crowdsourced Wikipedia articles are oftentimes the first source of information people read to learn more about a disaster. Likewise, the OpenStreetMap…

  • New Real-time OSM service provides custom up-to-date Extracts of OpenStreetMap Data

    Disaster events damage human infrastructure and its surroundings within seconds. To support humanitarian logistics, the Disaster OpenRouteService needs the latest, most accurate data available. While crowd-sourcing OSM updates during disasters proved very successful, there is not yet a convenient way of automatically accessing up-to-date OSM data for specific regions of interest. Addressing this need, HeiGIT…

  • HeiGIT/GIScience Heidelberg partnership with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)

    We are happy to hereby announce the official partnership of the HeiGIT/GIScience Research Group Heidelberg and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)! The GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University has been supporting the use of OpenStreetMap for humanitarian and disaster management purposes already since 2008 when the first instance of the Disaster and Emergency OpenRouteService was…

  • Happy Birthday MapSwipe!

    Already one year ago that MapSwipe was officially launched! A big thank you to our contributors for your support – one year of tapping, swiping and putting families on the map! In just one year thousands of users contributed more than 10 million taps and thereby provided crucial information on unmapped places. In projects like…

  • Call For Participation for Crowdsourced Damage Assessment Project

    In the aftermath of a disaster, knowing the condition of buildings, infrastructure, and utilities is critical to both immediate response and long-term recovery efforts. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is often asked to help identify damage to buildings and other assets in the affected region. In the past, limitations in post-disaster imagery and difficulties in…

  • New Disaster OpenRouteService for Africa, South America and Indonesia released, supporting humanitarian logistics with OSM more sustainably

    Recently HeiGIT @ GIScience Heidelberg released a dedicated stable disaster version of OpenRouteService (ORS) to support humanitarian logistics within specific regions of catastrophes with data from OSM in a more sustainable way. Since his start in 2008 OpenRouteServivce had been spontaneously applied for specific real world disaster cases already numerous times, for instance during the earthquakes in…

  • Overview Article on Online Participation in Geoinformation Technology, esp. OpenStreetMap

    An invited introductive overview article on “Online Participation in Geoinformation Technology” with a specific focus on OpenStreetMap has been published in the special issue “Online Participation” of the German language journal “Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik”. It gives some introduction and selected examples of potential usages of OSM data. Griesbaum, L., Eckle, M., Herfort, B., Raifer, M.,…

  • HOT Board Election: Congratulations Melanie!

    In the last week Melanie Eckle, who is working at the HeiGIT / GIScience Research Group Heidelberg, was elected as a Board Member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Congratulations Melanie! The newly elected Board Members Ahasanul Hoque, Pete Masters and Melanie Eckle will join Jorieke Vyncke and Dale Kunce. The Board is elected by HOT’s…

  • Supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals through Geographic Information – First United Nations World Data Forum

    Last month GIScience Heidelberg (Prof. Zipf) participated in the First United Nations World Data Forum. This was a high level event including many organisations that generate and analyse data related to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. For this we need a huge amount of data about…

  • MapSwipe2HOT_Tasking_Manager is OSM_Wiki “Image of the Week”

    This week’s “OSM Wiki “Image of the Week”” shows two maps from our efforts to use MapSwipe data for defining and prioritising OSM Hot Tasking Manager tasks. We appreciate the recognition 🙂 The workflow and respective tools have been introduced recently and are based on the “Heidelberg Process“, that lead to the development of MapSwipe…

  • Integrating MapSwipe and HOT Tasking Manager

    The MapSwipe app allows you to mark buildings and roads on satellite imagery within just a few seconds by tapping on your smartphone. Thousands of volunteers contributed to MapSwipe so far and it is just incredible how big the areas are that have been scanned (also see : With one swipe or tap you put…

  • HOT Summit MapSwipe and Pybossa Video Online

    The presentations of this years HOT summit that was held in Brussels (September 22, 2016) were recorded and are now available in the Youtube channel of HOT, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. If you missed the summit and are interested in what we are doing, have a look at the video of the joint presentation of…