FreeMap Gaza Moves Forward

Gaza

The Gaza map is going great, it seems. With a talented group of young engineers and GIS students, tremendous effort by the University College of Applied Sciences, and a continually improving set of procedures for field work, our data collection is moving forward with no insurmountable complications.

Our teams have been well organized and picked up the OSM technique quickly and easily. Gaza City is nearly finished, and our teams are moving northward this week. After sorting out a myriad of technical issues during the past week, we expect the development of our data set to grow faster and faster.

Currently the GIS unit of the Gaza municipality is working on unifying their geographic data and developing a road management system to anticipate and improve road repairs, and with luck we will soon be able to collaborate on some of our field surveying work.

West Bank Update

The past two weeks our editing team has been hard at work reconciling our field work with road tracings and data provided by our partner organizations. At long last our West Bank data set is reaching completion, and all that remains is to upload the remaining data to the server and do some final verification and assessment.

In the meantime we are pursuing meaningful ways of distributing the data and putting it to use, assessing the procedures implemented in our project, and pushing forward with FreeMap Gaza to complete our data set for all of Palestine.

Hebron returns, as we put our completed data set back up on the FreeMap server

FreeMap Gaza Launched

After an 18 month absence, JumpStart returned to Gaza and received a warm welcome. The mapping initiative has begun with our partners at the University College of Applied Sciences, and our teams have already started to map Gaza city. There's a great deal of under-utilized talent in Gaza, as thousands of university graduates go without work. We're happy to be working with some highly qualified engineers and geographic students in the development of our Gaza map.

Thousands of buildings were destroyed in the recent war, and with no construction materials entering Gaza, structures continue crumbling

Gaza continues to experience the aftershocks of the January war, and it seems like there are daily scuffles, strikes, and tragedies. With few to no reconstruction materials allowed through the borders, the local infrastructure remains in disrepair, and the collapsed buildings are a constant reminder of the situation here.

We hope to finish our map project in Gaza in mid-May even though, as our mapping recruits assure us, nothing is sure in Gaza. With the effort here we'll reach our goal of a free and open data set for all of Palestine, information which can be applied to a wide range of uses in public, private, and non-govermental spheres. As we develop our free Gaza map, we look forward to giving more detail to the already excellent work of the OpenStreetMap crew.

Let the mapping commence!

Engineers and GIS students examine a GPS

Many buildings, including those at the university, were hit during the war

Field Program Manager Jeff Haack with the first teams of mappers

Hebron Lives

While it's been a challenge to coordinate our work using between OpenStreetMap tools and data produced as ESRI shapefiles, we have developed the necessary protocols to get this done.

Although the Hebron region (in the south of West Bank) was the first place to be mapped when we started operating in December, it was taken offline for editing and has been missing from our server for a month. We continue to work on the data offline to properly classify and identify the roads, but today we put the road system up on our FreeMap server.

Developing the data offline from our various resources has proved to be greatly efficient, and we have nearly completed the road system for the Tulkarem and Qalqiliya regions in less than a week.

Hebron roads (not classified)

Ramallah Ramallah

Five weeks ago we moved our field teams from Hebron to the northern cities of Jenin, Nablus, and Ramallah. During this time they've worked with local volunteers and university students to map those districts. Within a week we expect to complete the field work in each of these regions, with the four smallest of eleven districts remaining. Our editors have been working with data collected from various partners, and we've begun to establish road systems at an excellent pace. This makes our field work much easier and more efficient, as the teams in the north need only to collect detailed waypoint data, verify roads, and identify missing road information.

Ramallah road system

Movement

After signing an agreement last week with Atlas Corporation, we've begun to work with their existing road and waypoint data for the whole of the West Bank. Our editors in Bethlehem are hard at work organizing and updating the data, and are putting a system in place for coordinating with our field teams around Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin.

Yesterday a team went to Qalqiliya (west of Nablus, adjacent to the wall with Israel) to get field work initiated there. Boundaries and borders continue to define our work. Mapping Qalqiliya was neither plan A nor plan B, but our intention to get started in the region just north of that area was delayed by the closure of the road and reports of arrests.

One JumpStart employee lives in Hebron but is working at the PCBS office in Ramallah. This morning she was unable to come to work due to the closure of Hebron checkpoints. It's not easy to move around in the West Bank, though we've been fortunate not to have progress hindered tremendously.

Partnership Agreement with Atlas

Today we finalized our agreement with Atlas Corporation to get their shape files for the West Bank in exchange for updating them with recent satellite imagery and field surveys. Atlas Corporation is a private company, the largest land survey and map-making company in the West Bank. We approached them a month ago with this idea and after obtaining a sample of their data and updating it for them as an example of our work, they were happy to approve the deal.

Even though adding this new data load to our already demanding timeline does not make things easier for us, it makes JumpStart's map much more accurate and improves our map-making protocol for future endeavors.

Jamal Jumaa, General Manager of Atlas Corporation, and Christopher Weaver, Program Manager for JumpStart