Imagery from satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other aircraft is becoming increasingly available after a disaster. It is often difficult to determine what is available and easily access it. OpenAerialMap (OAM) seeks to solve this by providing a simple open way to process and provide imagery for humanitarian response and disaster preparedness.

There have been multiple tries to start OpenAerialMap in the past. This current iteration is being started by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team and partners through the gracious support of the Humanitarian Innovation Fund.

Imagery from satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other aircraft is becoming increasingly available after a disaster. It is often difficult to determine what is available and easily access it. OpenAerialMap (OAM) seeks to solve this by providing a simple open way to process and provide imagery for humanitarian
response and disaster preparedness.

There are a couple of ways to contribute:

  • fork the github repository and creating a pull request
  • select any text on the page and add an annotation (you first need to login to http://annotateit.org/)

These are some of the possible users profiled through community discussions:

  • anonymous user
    • wants to use imagery for tracing
    • doesn’t know any details about the system, possibly not even aware that OAM exists
    • doesn’t really care how many layers exist, or how to select a specific layer
    • does know how to click on links, and copy paste information
  • power user
    • knows how to process imagery
    • wants to freely share imagery with others
  • DIY imagery collector
    • any amateur that has equipment to capture unprocessed imagery using DIY kites/balloons/XXcopters/water bottle rockets
    • doesn’t know much about imagery processing
    • wants to freely share imagery with others
  • corporate imagery provider
    • has raw/processed imagery of an area
    • wants to restrict access/usage for specific purpose (permissive/open ?!?!? proprietary license)
    • does not want to host imagery
  • generic imagery provider
    • has imagery is freely available online via standard protocols (WMS, WMTS, WCS, …)
    • resourceful supporter
    • has good network connection (high bandwidth) and server resources
    • wants to be an active member (node) in the OAM network
  • low-bandwidth user
    • has poor internet connection, works in the remote areas
    • wants to provide imagery access for an specific local area and minimize bandwidth usage in the local network (local cache)
  • wandering researcher
    • needs access to the RAW (unaltered) imagery
    • wants to quickly check what imagery is available for an area
    • desires high quality metadata, like: acquisition time, software used for processing, imagery lineage