Volunteers from CubeWerx and The Carbon Project announced that free mapping data from OpenStreetMap, the United Nations and other sources have been organized into an open information network for the nation of Haiti. The Haiti Spatial Data Infrastructure is a public resource that may be updated by anyone and used in Google Earth, OpenStreetMap, the Gaia SDI Platform and other applications to support relief and rebuilding.
The Haiti SDI is based on international standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.: the OGC Web Map Service and OGC Web Feature Services Interface Standards. The Haiti SDI provides four capabilities:
Haiti SDI Cascading WMS – A unique service that provides a single access point for applications like Google Earth, Gaia SDI Platform and OSM editors that implement WMS. The service works by aggregating WMS deployed in the last few days into one easy-to-use resource – including New York Public Library, University of Cincinnati, CubeWerx framework WMS, GeoEye and DigitalGlobe imagery, government data and more.
Haiti SDI OSM WFS – A data service that refreshes from OpenStreetMap sources every hour, and deploys the data as OGC WFS so any application may instantly connect to the most up-to-date information from the OSM community.
Haiti SDI UN WFS – A data service that provides United Nations framework data through an open interface that implements the WFS standard. United Nations framework data includes Boundaries, Hydrography, Transportation, Locations, and Population information.
Haiti SDI VGI WFS – A Volunteered Geographic Information service that enables anyone to add to the information described above, contributing their own Haiti framework data and information about emergency operations, locations and points of interest data. This service employs OGC standards based tools such as the Gaia WFS-T Extender.
All OpenStreetMap, United Nations and Volunteered Geographic Information for Haiti SDI are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.