Since Haiti I have been doing a lot of reading on disaster response and recovery. Today I needed to load a GeoRSS feed from USGS. They publish the location of earthquakes as a GeoRSS feed. They also publish a product called ShakeMaps. This is a fantastic product since it provides a map of the actual “ground shaking” a not just the simplistic magnitude and epicentre. Creating a ShakeMap is a function of local geology, epicentre, magnitude and many other variables. You can read about it here. ShakeMap are thus much more useful from a disaster response and recovery point-of-view. For example if you have the necessary data on geology and population exposure you can run a model that simulates an earthquake over a region to predict the likely effect on the population.
Getting back to the GeoRSS – the ShakeMap feed allows us to integrate this into any web mapping application thus creating interesting mashups. E.g. overlaying it with socio-economic or population exposure or vulnerability data to show the simulation results I mention above.
Okay so I’ll show you how to set up a GeoRSS feed parser using Sinatra. Here is the ShakeMap as GeoRSS Feed. You will need ruby and sinatra installed.
Here is the code for the routes in sinatra:
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
require 'open-uri'get '/' do
haml :shakemaps
endget '/proxy' do
open params["url"]
endWhen the client hits the our root url (/) we will render the OpenLayers map with the USGS ShakeMap. We may also want to let people add other feeds.
So in our shakemaps.rb the first route is to the root. This is pretty simple, when the root of the app is hit the server renders the shakemaps haml template. The haml template loads our javascript to render the OpenLayers map. This javascript also calls the shakemap GeoRSS feed via a proxy. The proxy is needed because OpenLayers which is a javascript library isn’t allowed cross-site-server calls. The proxy is where the second method in shakemaps.rb comes along. It looks for the parameter url at the end of the URI and simply opens it. This is the GeoRSS XML feed. Finally there is a form allowing us to point to other GeoRSS feeds.
OSM in Pakistan hasn’t been very active in the past. However the future is looking bright. This year during the state of the map in Amsterdam you will run into a university professor – but don’t let the absent minded-professor-look fool you. This is a man on a mission – as a professor at the largest university in Multan (Bahauddin Zakariya University) he has managed to generate a ground swell of students and faculty to start systematic mapping of Multan. He has just received a small (as in tiny) grant from his University to help kick-start the mapping of Multan. 
Mapping & Planning Support (MAPS) meets OpenStreetMap (OSM)
Mapping and Planning Support (MAPS) is a volunteer group based out of Canberra that provides Geographic Information Systems (GIS) support to emergency services during a “major” disaster. It was started in 2005 by Frank Blanchfield and Ian Batley who foresaw the need for a stand-by volunteer mapping team that could spring into action during a major natural disaster. MAPS was strongly supported by Adam Atkinson (RFS) and Steve Forbes (SES/RFS). By the time I joined MAPS in 2008 the team had already had several dozen deployments for a range of emergency activities: everything from fires, floods and flus. MAPS volunteers come from a multi-talented pool of professionals and they are the Australian equivalent of MapAction. There is a great presentation by Ian Batley on the volunteer technical community model of MAPS.
You can’t really talk about MAPS without making reference to the Black Saturday Bushfires. The Black Saturday firestorm of 13th February 2009 was Australia’s worst natural disaster. The fires were intense and ferocious and led to over a 170 fatalities and damaged over 3000 properties. Some towns were nearly wiped off the earth. Just two days after Black Saturday the first MAPS team was deployed on ground working with Victoria Police and other state and federal agencies to assist. That operation continued for 9 weeks. During the deployment MAPS assisted Victoria Police in the coordination of Search & Rescue efforts. Accomplishments included developing map products for carrying out search of over 3000 property parcels in a period of 2 weeks; developing workflows, data quality control routines and databases for capturing, storing, and analysing data collected by field search and rescue teams; developing mapping products to aid reporting of fatalities. Data captured included spatially referenced photographs, high resolution aerial imagery and real time data from GPS enabled handhelds and cameras. Software used included ArcPAD, ArcGIS, ArcSDE, SQLServer and MS-Access. I also wrote custom scripts (in ruby) to process over 9000 georeferenced photographs.
After the MAPS deployment to Victoria we started a working group to investigate the potential for using Open Source tools along with the proprietary applications that are currently used.
Then in January 2010 another natural disaster caught the world’s attention. I wanted to help. But this time I was several thousand miles away from the disaster. I have never been to Haiti, yet I was able to contribute towards the mapping of a country that had had it’s national mapping agency completely destroyed and sadly most of its staff killed. The work was done sitting in my home office working late at night to digitize aerial photograph, intermittent with some wiki gardening. This time I was not working under any formal organisation but rather with a loose community of open source and mapping enthusiasts. And due to my background of working with MAPS I was acutely aware of the value of mapping to first responders. Thanks to the OSM community this work was being used by responders in Haiti. After Haiti I gave a few presentations on how this data was collected, used and will play a key role in the future of Haiti. That talk is at slideshare.
After Haiti I realised that although MAPS can handle disasters in Australia and the Asia Pacific region – if they had formal links with the OpenStreetMap, CrisisCommons and CrisisMappers communities they could learn a lot from each other and the collaboration would help become much more versatile. As I was thinking about formalising this relationship the time for the MAPS Autumn Training also came along. This provided an ideal opportunity to introduce OSM to MAPS. And as it turned out other MAPS co-ordinators where also thinking the same thing. So last weekend we had a training day at the ACT State Emergency Services HQ and we included OpenStreetMap – a crowd sourced, open and free database of spatial data. AFIK this was the first time in the history of MAPS and Australian volunteer emergency community, in general, that a crowd sourced database was used. This is the first step by MAPS to engage with the OSM community and over the coming weeks the working group will be meeting regularly to start to pull together the tools and expertise needed to make OSM a regular source of data and information. My presentation slides and tutorial videos are below:
Here is a video showing how to print walking papers and collect data.
Walking Papers Tutorial – part 1 from shoaib burq on Vimeo.
Here is the video showing the use of walking papers to add data to OSM.
Walking-Papers Tutorial part 2 from shoaib burq on Vimeo.