New Emergency Route Service Online for Haiti

18 January 2010, 10:24am

New Emergency Route Service Online for Haiti supporting disaster management after the earthquake - based on OpenStreetMap and OpenRouteService

Only 2 days after the Haiti earthqake the team of the Chair of Geoinformatics / GIScience at the Department of Geography of the University of Heidelberg published a new Onlye Route Service.
The first version is online at http://openls.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/osm-haiti/
Thanks for the effort of the Heidelberg team, in particular Pascal Neis and colleagues.

The service features "AvoidAreas", e.g. blocked streets. The service is based on earlier work of the group on OpenRouteService.org and uses the free geodata of OpenStreetMap (OSM), which is updated hourly. OpenRouteService implements the OpenGIS Location Services specifications (OpenLS).

A similar service was already realized by the team of Prof. Zipf during Hurrican IKE in 2008 for supporting the work of the United Nations Logistics Cluster but using proprietary data. As OpenStreetMap has grown substantly since then, OSM data is now better and therfore used with the new service. Anybody can improve the data further - see the wiki below.

Further information:
Prof. Dr. Alexander Zipf
Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg
zipf@uni-heidelberg.de

New Emergency Route Service Online

Geo: International