17 Nov. 23

Grab continues to put unwavering effort into enhancing the quality of OpenStreetMap data in South-East Asia, leveraging abundant local resources and dedicated country-specific mapping teams. The latest development in this ambitious venture is the forthcoming addition of a real-time incident reporting feature. Here, Grab harnesses reports from driver partners to fine-tune the map data further.

Although we are only at the inception of this initiative, we’re already receiving a significant number of reports addressing the “Turn Restriction”, “One-way”, “Gate Closed”, and “Incorrect Street Name” related map data discrepancies. These reports will pinpoint the exact or nearby location of the reported issue, as relayed by drivers in real-time or when taking detours, along with the reporting date. So, we are using our location resource to verify these and fix the map data issue in OpenStreetMap using available resources.

We believe that this data holds immense potential if harnessed collectively through community participation, paving the way to a comprehensive solution. On this note, in the future, Grab aims to make accessible the reported data for review by the community.

Grab is going to open real-time incident reports to the community to fix the map data issue on OpenStreetMap.

Advances in weather forecasting and climate science now enable to act before hazards strike rather than investing primarily in humanitarian response after disasters happen. These anticipatory approaches enable more people to receive needed assistance ahead of predictable shocks. Anticipatory action allows humanitarians and affected communities to make informed decisions ahead of a humanitarian crisis – saving time and money; preventing displacement, disease, loss of livelihood; and preserving the dignity of those affected. The availability of accurate information is an integral part in the anticipatory action to take proper decisions within a short lead time period. Disasters has a spatial dimension too. Hence, an integrating spatial dimension in to the data and information is a must to make effective and efficient decisions during humanitarian action. Sri Lanka Anticipatory Action for Disaster Mitigation Project integrated Open Street Mapping tool to create a spatial database. This is prepared with the support of relevant stakeholders. This has enabled to analysis of spatial distribution of vulnerable households across the project locations. This helped decision makers to mobilize more resources to the needy areas during humanitarian action.


Key words: Anticipatory Action, Open Mapping, Data and Information, Resource Mobilization

This is a collaborative workshop where we can bring in a room different OSM community representatives and partners from disaster agencies, CSOs, humanitarian orgs, businesses, etc and connect them with one another. This is an opportunity for partners to understand better the OSM community and vice versa. Hopefully, this workshop can produce more collaboration between the private and the OSM community




Strengthening Resilience through Mapping Emergency Response Routes and Health
Care Facilities

Chimi Dema and Nusrat Jahan Nilima




From Crisis to Resilience: Geospatial Solutions for Climate Change and Disaster
Resilience in the HKH region

Sameera Noori and Dilshad Bano




We Can Show and We Can Tell: Narratives of Mapping Local and Indigenous Knowledge with Community and Youths in Lower Eastern Himalayas Harshit Sosan Lakra

Overture Maps is a new open data initiative by a consortium of mapping companies – many of which are also involved in OSM. For OSM mappers and data users, Overture might seem like a competing project towards the same goal – a free and complete global geo dataset.

Overture released its first datasets in Summer 2023, let’s take a look at their data! I’m a long-time developer of OSM tools and an outsider to Overture, and I’ll give my perspective on the project’s potential:

* Putting Overture data on a map using FOSS tools – Tippecanoe, PMTiles, and Planetiler
* Overture themes and tags vs. OSM
* Differences and similarities in contribution models + licensing
* Deep dive on state-of-the-art tools for processing Overture/ OSM + how OSM might adopt efficient storage formats like Parquet
* Using Overture as a complement to improve OSM