Can Unen
Can is the OpenStreetMap Trainer for the Asia-Pacific Regional Hub. Based in Turkey, he got his B.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and his Ph.D. in Geomatics from Istanbul Technical University, specializing in GIS-based applications in disaster management and seismic loss assessment. He also spent time at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as a visiting researcher at the Mid-America Earthquake Center during 2008 and 2009. He is also a founding member of Yer Cizenler, a Turkish NGO within the OSM-TR community since 2017.
Sessions
On February 6, 2023 a sequence of major earthquakes with magnitudes 7.8 and 7.5 have struck Southern Turkiye and Northern Syria, causing massive damage and very high number of casualties in both countries. The sequence of earthquakes were followed with hundreds of aftershocks within the month following the earthquakes, as well as triggering other major earthquakes, such as the 6.4 magnitude earthquake that had struck Antakya on February 20. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), with Yer Çizenler (YÇ), HOT’s local partner within the Turkish OSM community, have activated to map the missing road and building base data with the help of regional and global OpenStreetMap communities.
More than 7 thousand contributors from these communities, together, have contributed to the addition of more than 1.4 million buildings, 70,000 km of roads into OpenStreetMap for the use of field volunteers and organizations worldwide.
In this talk, the audience will be informed about the coordinated efforts within this mapping activation, the impact of the data created with some example use cases within the response activities. The audience will be informed about various open data sources that were used to enhance the existing OSM data, and their licensing and compatibility considerations during the mapping process. The presenters will also describe the validation, data quality assurance and monitoring methods, approaches and tools utilized for ensuring the OSM data is reliable, current and is able to meet community standards within both short and long terms.