Haiti

Over the Christmas period I imported the road network for Haiti – many thanks to Haiti’s CNIGS (Centre National de l’Information Géo-Spatiale) and CartONG. It has pretty much all the regular roads, but there’s still quite a bit of work to do.

Late last year, we met at the GeOng conference in Chambery, organised by CartOng.  It was about the role of geodata and GIS in humanitarian work & crisis response (we also had a tiny mapping party afterwards). At the time, there were people on the ground in Haiti working to get some good quality data to share with other organisations. There were a few sources, some quite detailed, with even the little farm tracks mapped but very poor quality and inaccurate (possibly traced from un-orthorectified imagery), others were good, but were unable to be released publicly.  Bernard from CartONG was out in Haiti during and after the conference and was key in giving us the data on behalf of the Centre National de l’Information Géo-Spatiale (CNIGS).

Yahoo Imagery covers the area quite well, however the hurricane has affected the area quite considerably:

That saying, there are residential roads and tracks that can be traced.  It would be good to incorporate affected areas, which roads are closed, and which ones have been opened.  ReliefWeb has a few good resources. Interestingly, the map of road conditions highlights the types of road conditions interpreted as practical information, “4×4 can only pass over bridge, trucks have to ford river”. This is exactly the type of information that the UNSDIT seeks to make it easy to record.

Topology needs checking and validating – the original data had plenty of gaps and overhangs – roads that didn’t join up with each other properly (spent a couple of days fixing most of these). There are a few things that need to checked and correct properly.