1) The presenter discussed the role of neogeography and volunteered geographic information (VGI) in crisis mapping during and after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. 2) Case studies were presented on how OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi's Sinsai.info platform were used to collect and map crowdsourced geographic information from social media to support relief efforts. 3) Long-term efforts included creating detailed restoration maps of affected areas through mapping parties and fieldwork with local residents to document rebuilding progress over time.

1. 2012 ABCD-GIS Meeting, December 19, 2012 @ CGIS South S050
The Role of the Neogeography for
Geospatial Information Sharing:
the Case Studies of the Crisis Mapping Project
and the FOSS4G Community in Japan
© sinsai.info All Rights Reserved. © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA
Toshikazu SETO （ Ph.D)
CGA, Harvard Univ. ＆ DH-JAC, Ritsumeikan Univ.

2. Agenda
• Introductions
• Overview of the Crisis Geospatial Information
Sharing during the 311 Disasters
• Case Studies “Crisis Mapping Project using FOSS4G”:
– Base Map Creations (OSGeo.JP & OSM)
– SNS + Mapping Platform (sinsai.info & Ushahidi)
• For the Monitoring and Recovery
• Conclusions

3. Introductions: Concepts
Neogeography
•Neogeography combines the complex techniques of cartography and GIS
and places them within reach of users and developers.
•Neogeography is about sharing location information with friends and
visitors, helping to shape contexts, and conveying an understanding
through the knowledge of place.
•Andrew Turner (2006): 『 Introduction to Neogeography 』

4. Volunteered Geographic Information
• Citizens are using handheld devices to collect geographic information and
contribute it to crowd-sourced data sets; they are employing Web-based
mapping interfaces to mark and annotate geographic features…
• These citizens are largely untrained; their actions are almost always
voluntary, and their results may or may not be accurate.
• However, their activities represent a dramatic innovation that will
certainly have profound impacts on GIS.
• Michael Goodchild (2007): “Citizens as Sensors”

5. Neocartography & FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial)
• “Map makers who may not have come from traditional mapping
backgrounds, and are frequently using open data and open source mapping
tools …..
• ….. the availability of data and tools allows these neocartographers both
to make their own maps and often be the intended audience as well – that
is to say they may make the maps for themselves, just because they can…
(http://neocartography.icaci.org/mission-and-aims/)
• Chilton, S. (2008), M.J. Kraak (2011)

6. Crisis mapping
• Crisis Mapping is thus live mapping that is focused on crises,
broadly defined, from slow-burn crises to sudden-onset
disasters. Crisis Mapping is certainly not restricted to political
crises; it may include social and environmental ones as well.
(Meier, 2011)
• Ushahidi is a free and open source software (LGPL) program
available for information collection, visualization and
interactive mapping.
http://irevolution.net/2011/01/20/what-is-crisis-mapping/

7. Overview of the Crisis Geospatial
Information Sharing during the 311
Disasters

8. Background
• Great Hanshin Earthquake of January 15, 1995
• The first year of activity by citizens volunteers
• The focus on the GIS by the local government
• The first Japanese GIS law established (May, 2007)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mah_japan/4479363670/ CC-BY 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisa_joy/5071045906/ CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

9. The Great East Japan Earthquake
• The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011
brought catastrophic damage to a huge area of Japan.
• In comparison to the 1995 earthquake, a greater tsunami
caused more devastation and a grave nuclear
accident(Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power) .
• Although the traffic and communication infrastructures
were interrupted, people shared information on area
damage or the conditions of victims by using social media,
such as Twitter and the mobile Internet (Tsuda 2011,
Peary, Shaw and Takeuchi 2012).

10. Enterprise: Google Crisis Response
Traffic Performance Information
http://www.google.co.jp/intl/ja/crisisresponse/
japanquake2011_traffic.html

11. Professionals: ArcGIS Online
http://bit.ly/Owiof5

12. Professionals: Association of Japanese
Geographers (ex. Geoserver+GeoExt)
http://map311.ecom-plat.jp/map/map/?mid=40&cid=3&gid=0

13. Map Company: Mapion (ex. Mapserver)

14. Citizens: Map of Food Supplies & Evacuation places
http://bit.ly/hKcDQw

15. Neogeographers: The East Japan Earthquake Archive
http://shinsai.mapping.jp/

16. International Archive Projects: Harvard Univ.
http://cegrp.cga.harvard.edu/japan/?q=content/home
http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/397/
http://beta.jdarchive.org/ja/home

17. Progress and Issues
• Many portal sites started very quickly
(one to five days after the disaster)
• They used FOSS4G architecture and API services
• Some of the Japanese enterprise/professional
projects were mainly Web-map representation
(source data could not be obtained and reused).
• Some of the projects closed or did not update
their websites one-year after 311.

18. Case Studies:
“Crisis Mapping Project using FOSS4G”

19. Overviews

20. • Rectified aerial photos
• Construction of open (Jpn-Eng)
OSGeo.JP gazetteer database
• ML, Twitter

21. OSGeo.JP Corroborate with
@wata909 (Nobusuke Iwasaki: Project Manager)
Neogeographers
• Beginning with OSGeoJP, discuss ML and
Twitter.
• Over 20 volunteers joined the project.
• About 100 aerial photographs were geo-
rectified in two days.
• Thousands of photographs were merged with
GDAL
• Some related projects were setup in order to
facilitate this work.

22. Using Cloud Services

23. Many Satellite Data allow to use by OSM
JAXA/ALOS, DigitalGlobe etc…
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JA:2011_Sendai_
earthquake_and_tsunami/Imageries

24. • Mapping using aerial photos
OpenStreetMap • Import GIS data
(OSM) •
•
Translation
OSM Wiki, IRC, Twitter, Drupal

25. Japanese OSM Users and key=highway Statistics
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Techstrom/JapanData

26. 2011.03
2011.10
26

27. Workflow Geodatabase
-osm_pt, osm_ln, osm_ply
ArcGIS for
Japan.osm (18GB) OpenStreetMap
(daily dump file)
80,034,276 nodes
$ spatialite_osm_net 6,801,613 ways
-o japan121118.osm 12,301 relations
–d ja121118.sqlite -T （ time: 18 h 3 m 14
features sec ）
Spatialite
inserted 80,034,276 nodes
25,972,822 tags
inserted 6,801,613 ways
44,327,471 tags
89,638,321 node-refs
inserted 12,301 relations
sqliteman
64,698 tags
191,977 refs ex. SELECT k, COUNT(v)
FROM "osm_way_tags"
GROUP BY k

32. 2011/3/11 – 4/11

33. 2011/3/11 – 4/11

34. 2011/3/11 – 4/11

35. • Disaster information management
Sinsai.info through SMS
(Ushahidi) • System development
• Github, Yammer, Lingr (Skype), Twitter

36. sinsai.info （ SocialMedia + Map: Opensource
Platform)
platform for disaster information sharing connecting reports with
some locational information to the maps (The word of ‘sinsai’:
disaster in Japanese) http://sinsai.info/

37. #jishin:earthquake #j_j_helpme:need help
reports #hinan:evacuation collection and checking reports
#anpi: safety confirmation
report@sinsai.info
mail
website other sites
checked by the moderators
・ Release: 18:26 Mar. 11th (14:46 earthquake occurred)
・ moderators: about 20 members developer:10 members
・ gross participants: over 300 members
・ supporting companies: over 15 (Amazon,Yahoo, NTT, NTT Data,
etc..)
・ Reports: 23,836, PageView: 628,534 （ 3/11-4/22 ）
・ Outputs
API (KML&REST API), GitHub (https://github.com/sinsai), Android …

42. For the Monitoring and Recovery

43. The Big Data Workshop for Project 311 #sinsaidata
(Hosted by Google & Twitter Japan)
”Mass Media Coverage Map” of The East Japan Earthquake
(http://media.mapping.jp/)

44. Totsukawa-village (Nara Pref.) Disaster Map
https://totsukawa.crowdmap.com/

45. Radiation Measurements by local government:
Geo-visualization of Neogeographers
Using Google Fusion Tables (@d_shiba)
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S206201bfzG

46. The Supports of Recovery and
Restoration using IT x OSM
x
Kenichi Takahashi
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ktaka/5745142690 ・ 5742669976

47. Ideathon + Hackathon
Engineers
NPO/NGO etc-
Designers
Problems
Others
Join Ideas,
Human resources
Support
Hack-a-thon
http://www.slideshare.net/hal_sk/sinsaiinfo-and-hack-for-japan-social-media-week
by Hal Seki

48. Why is a restoration map needed ?
• Response to local “Up-to-date” information
• Official guide by Chamber of Commerce ⇔ OSM
• The possibility of collaboration by volunteers and residents
Source: http://kamaishi-town.com/

49. 2012/03/20 First Mapping Party
in Kamaishi
■Purpose
•Where is the restoration ?
•What kinds of the restoration ?
•(Geo-)visualization of the recently conditions
■Challenges
•Collected detail information from the local residents
•It wants to visit a lot of people in Kamaishi

50. 2012/03/20 First Mapping Party in Kamaishi
■Challenges
•Collected detail information
from local residents
•Desire to visit many people in
Kamaishi
•Contacted over 40 people in
fieldwork (using GPS) and
introduced OSM editing
•Logistics support by
Yokohama-team

51. 2012/03/16

52. 2012/03/24

53. 2012/05/12-13 Second Mapping Party in Kamaishi
■Purpose
•What kind of restoration map?
•Discussion of the map’s features:
shops, public facilities, tourism resources, etc.
•The development of Pdf and/or paper-based self-
making restoration map using OSM data

54. 2012/09/01-02 Field Excursion Tour with HOT
https://www.facebook.com/groups/hack4iwate.osm/

55. Before 311 Earthquakes

56. 311 Earthquakes after one month

57. After the 1st Mapping Party

58. After the 2nd Mapping Party

59. After the HOT Excursion Tour

60. What kind of the restoration
map feature(s)
• Targeting shops
– The name of the
shop
– Type of the service
– Opening-closing
time
– Telephone number
– When is it open,
and where is it
located?

61. The Discussion of
Restore Mapping Tag
name
Evacuation Housing
name:ja_kana
amenity=shelter
amenity
cuisineopening_hours
Massage shop
phone
shop=massage
addr:full
restart_day
source
61

62. The localization and re-designing of based MapOSMatic
by Restoration Map Team (ongoing)

63. Making User Manual of Field Papers
by Restoration Map Team(ongoing)

64. Conclusions
• The Neogeographers contributed a vast amount
of visual geospatial information in the response
period.
• Crowd sourcing and FOSS4G easily furthered
networking activities.
• The awareness of information sharing and
openness in crisis response increased.
• FOSS4G and Neogeography were committed to
other possible disaster uses.
(However, they were not able to deliver information
and services directly to disaster area residents.)

65. Issues
• The difficulty of the evaluation
– VGI’s voluminous data; citizen motivation
• The gap of the IT literacy and GIS skills in the
Tohoku area
– Continuing collaboration with Tohoku area is
necessary
• Too many geospatial archive projects and related
social network channels
– The continuity of the project and community growth
– SNS: Twitter, Facebook, Lingr, Redmine, GitHub, etc.

66. The Role of the Neogeography and VGI
for Next Steps
• More active support for mapping by local residents
• The special needs of easy-use, restoration
mapping
• The visualization of opening-closing times,
holidays, etc.
– Not only by neogeographers but also citizens
• Need for more educational opportunities and
resources to prepare (neo)geographers for next
crisis

67. Thank you for your attention !
Twitter & Facebook: @tosseto
E-mail: tos@lt.ritsumei.ac.jp
Special Thanks to: Nishimura, Y., Furuhashi, T., Seki, H.,
Kamaishi Mapping Team, OSMFJ and OSGeo.JP