Organised Editing/Activities/Afghanistan Mapping

BUILDING FOOTPRINT FOR URBAN AGGLOMERATIONS IN AFGHANISTAN

Background

The Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) was established in 2002 to provide a coordinated financing mechanism for the Government of Afghanistan's budget and priority national investment projects. An umbrella organization of 34 donors, the ARTF is managed by the World Bank Group (WBG) and as of February 2020 has allocated over US$10 billion for service delivery and reconstruction for the country’s needs. Due to conditions of insecurity in Afghanistan, direct supervision of financed activities and sites are often not possible. While the country does have a comprehensive inventory of high-quality satellite imagery, it is usually available at a high cost to a very select audience. Further, while the applications of spatial information and remote sensing are immense, understanding them is often limited due to capacity constraints. The densely packed urban agglomerations in Afghanistan, for example, have expensive imagery without any information that could enable services to be delivered or even identified.

For this purpose, the World Bank has hired Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL) to create a digital building footprint for 13 major urban agglomerations in Afghanistan. The main objectives of this effort are:

• To digitize the building footprints of 13 urban cities of Afghanistan into OpenStreetMap
• To validate the mapped building footprints and handover the database to the WBG

Following are the cities where buildings will be created.

SN	City	Province	SN	City	Province
1	Aybak	Samangan	8	Qala-e-Naw	Badghis
2	Bazarak	Panjsher	9	Zaranj	Nimroz
3	Charikar	Parwan	10	Bamyan	Bamyan
4	Gardez	Paktya	11	Ferozkoh	Ghor
5	Jalalabad	Nangarhar	12	Hirat	Hirat
6	Poruns	Nuristan	13	Mahmud-e-Raqi	Kapisa
7	Mazar-e-Sharif	Balkh

Contact

You can contact us through our email  kathmandulivinglabs@gmail.com or  Ro Sun in case you have questions about this project.

Hashtag

Hashtags used are #hotosm-project-specific_task_numbers #kll #worldbank #afghanistan #ARTF #kllinafghanistan2020 #kllworldbank as hashtags for this project.

Timeframe

It started on November 25, 2020 and is expected to be completed by February 15, 2021. The mapping is being done by the mappers trained by Kathmandu Living Labs and the data is validated by a team of highly experienced mappers from Kathmandu Living Labs.

Tools and Data Sources

Mappers are using HOT Tasking Manager and JOSM to map buildings using high resolution Maxar Premium Imagery. The boundaries for each city to be mapped has been provided by the World Bank Group. We will put links to all the links to the tasks once the project is completed.

SN	City	Link to the task	SN	City	Link to the task
1	Aybak	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/9909/	8	Qala-e-Naw	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/9983
2	Bazarak	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/9931/	9	Zaranj	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/9987
3	Charikar	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/9942/	10	Bamyan	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/10173
4	Gardez	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/10072	11	Ferozkoh	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/10357
5	Jalalabad	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/10040/	12	Hirat	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/10177
6	Poruns	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/9923/	13	Mahmud-e-Raqi	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/10300
7	Mazar-e-Sharif	https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/10302

Participants

The tasks can only be accessed by the mappers recruited by KLL and its staff. Altogether 14 mappers are mapping the tasks and 4 highly experienced mappers from KLL are validating the data. Following are the OSM usernames of the mappers.

S.no	Full Name	OSM Username	S.no	Full Name	OSM Username
1	Yukesh Byanjankar	Yukays	9	Suman Shrestha	Shrestha Suman
2	Rabi Shrestha	frozenrabi	10	Asmita Karki	asmitasummer
3	Angad Lamichhane	Lamichhane	11	Puspa Chad	Puspa chad
4	Ajaya Dhakal	Ajaya Dhakal	12	Pratkshya Giri	Pratikshya123
5	Prajwal Sharma	prajwalS	13	Alisha B.k	Alisha12
6	Pragya Pant	Pragya Pant	14	Ajaya Dhakal	Ajaya Dhakal
7	Bijay Dewan Rai	Bijay Dewan	15	Anish Chhetri	Roger Anish
8	Rajan Paudel	rajanpaudel

Post-Event Clean Up

We have emphasized data quality from the very beginning through a continuous data validation process. Mappers and data validators meet at 10 AM everyday to discuss and reflect on issues, and resolve them in order to ensure consistency in data creation and produce high quality data.

Map data is validated in 2 stages:

• By mappers themselves

Before uploading data to OSM, mappers themselves run validation in JOSM and resolve errors related to buildings. This includes:

• Overlapping buildings
• Building connected to roads and other features
• Building inside building

Once these errors are resolved, the mappers upload the data to OSM and mark the tile as ‘mapped’ in Tasking Manager.

• By data validators

Experienced mappers from KLL validate the ‘mapped’ tiles. Errors related to buildings, if found any, are resolved and uploaded. Next, they verify the correctness of the data. This includes:

• Data quality

Validators check the correctness of the building through the Maxar premium imagery overlaid with data mapped by the mappers. If the validator is satisfied with the quality then they move towards the criteria of map completeness. In case of a few errors, the validators correct them. If there are more errors, the tiles are marked as needing more mapping.

• Completeness

Once the validators are satisfied with map quality, they check for missing buildings in the imagery. Once they are satisfied, the tile is marked as ‘validated’; else it is marked as ‘invalid’, upon which mappers will have to map the tile again.

Results

Following are the outcome of the project:

S.no	City	Buildings created	S.no	City	Buildings created
1	Aybak	20,909	8	Qala-e-Naw	16,075
2	Bazarak	6,966	9	Zaranj	36,648
3	Charikar	30,270	10	Bamyan	13,672
4	Gardez	23,632	11	Ferozkoh	10,050
5	Jalalabad	96,234	12	Hirat	168,652
6	Poruns	167	13	Mahmud-e-Raqi	10,650
7	Mazar-e-Sharif	129,185	Total buildings created: 563114