Smart Maps for the UN and All - keeping web maps open
Do you want to broaden your horizons by learning about geospatial support for the United Nations operations? Or are you interested in developing highly efficient and portable geospatial apps which make use of PMTiles, COPC, COG, Raspberry Pi, and a cool Web3 technology named IPFS (Inter-planetary File System)? We are doing both in the Domain Working Group 7 (DWG 7) on Smart Maps of the UN Open GIS Initiative.
In this participatory and voluntary DWG established in Firenze in August 2023, participants bring in their objectives and combine efforts within the Partnership for Technology in Peacekeeping to bring greater involvement to peacekeeping through innovative approaches and technologies that have the potential to empower UN global operations. In addition to our core objective to support the use of UN Vector Tile Toolkit in the UN Global Service Centre, DWG 7 is supporting domestic and campus-level service operations, and supporting 3D geospatial data such as point clouds and 3D city models. We are combining efforts to define and implement the concept of Smart Maps.
We are happy to share with you our new effort named Model UN Development and Operations (MUNDO) that simulates geospatial support for the United Nations operations by making use of existing open geospatial data and our Smart Maps technologies. MUNDO project is not only useful for demonstrating the technology for the UN staff, but also useful for learning about the situation and the UN’s effort. We are also happy to share with you our new concept of WebMaps3, which introduces Web3 technology for web maps. By combining IPFS and cloud optimized formats like PMTiles, COPC, and COG, we were successful in hosting a vector tiles service from a newly released nation-wide cadastre dataset on a Raspberry Pi, within 10 days after the release, by producing a 14GB PMTiles file.
