What value does it bring to the user?

Validators, trainers, project managers and mappers that make use of the Tasking Manager will be able to monitor the mapping in near real-time, getting data quality insights.

This feature was released into the Tasking Manager for a limited set of users of 5 countries:

https://github.com/hotosm/tasking-manager/releases/tag/v4.7.2

Next step is to make it available for all Tasking Manager users of all countries.

The problem

The mapping process is often organized. Trainers and project leaders from communities run mapathons, then people contribute to the map, some of them for the first time ever.

1. Trainers and community runs mapathons
2. People contribute to the map, some of them for first time ever

But things can go wrong, sometimes really wrong. Keep in mind trainers don’t realize this, because most of the times they can’t see how people is mapping in that moment and can’t provide real-time feedback, so people don’t know what they did wrong. This is especially true for online mapping.

The solution

We're building a tool that enables the near real-time monitoring of the digital mapping. We'll use this tool in the Tasking Manager for improving the quality of the mapping.

With this tool, we’ll be able to list the latest changes, including their tags, geometries and a quality evaluation. You can see here a screenshot of how this works:

On the right the latest mapped features and on the left a map highlighting quality issues, in this example un-squared buildings, a good indicator of poor quality data.

Use cases

In our case, inside HOT, one of the main use cases for this solution is for monitoring mapping during mapathons and training, enabling trainers and project managers to identify and tackle quality issues right away, so mappers can learn to map in the right way, becoming better mappers and creating higher quality data.

HOT was born after the Haiti earthquake in 2015, where a lot of people mapped the whole capital in just a few days. So one of the things that we do a lot are activations, mapping together areas affected by disasters like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes or wildfires, using our flagship product the Tasking Manager. We’ll add a data quality section for each of these projects, made with Underpass.

We also have a product for displaying aerial imagery, OpenAerialMap, so we use this to monitor how the changes are being mapped. With Underpass, we can monitor data updated in near real-time. This is useful for identifying missing data, like destroyed buildings not tagged as such

Development / Deployment

The work that has to be done in order to enable this feature for all Tasking Manager users is mostly to ensure we can setup and monitor Underpass for processing huge amounts of data in a stable way.