Geospatial data is key for empowering citizens around the globe and to achieve the SDGs— if geodata is made openly available and easy to be put to use. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is in this regard coordinating and supporting humanitarian action and community resilience through open mapping.
The GIScience Research Group has supported HOT’s work for a couple of years already, through research and application development, to support open map data creation, analyses, and use. These efforts have shown great potential for humanitarian projects and disaster management and are since 2016 also further supported and strengthened by the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT).
The May/ June edition of the Geospatial World Magazine covers some of these activities in their print version, see the article here, pages 54-56. The article is a follow-up on a related presentation by Melanie Eckle (HeiGIT/HOT) during the Geo4SDGs session at the Geospatial World Forum that was organized in April in Amsterdam.
An extension of the article will be published beginning of July in the online version of the magazine- so stay tuned.
