I’ve been writing at Medium.com for the past year. Read this full original post there.
This tutorial was originally part of a joint workshop between DirectRelief, NetHope, and Facebook at the 2019 NetHope Global Summit in San Juan, PR.
The team I work with at Facebook has been busy releasing and updating RapiD, a version of the primary OpenStreetMap (OSM) iD editor that helps every mapper make fast, high-quality, and accurate edits using roads suggested by our AI-assisted road import process. We’ve been expanding OSM in countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and now Malaysia with a robot-assisted process that pairs advanced imagery processing to find likely roads in fresh aerial imagery with human oversight to confirm and add roads to OSM. Initially these tools were available internally but now they’re easy to use for anyone. In combination with up-to-the-minute OSM extracts it’s possible to integrate OSM into a GIS environment in a single session using just browser-based tools.
Check out a short video of RapiD in action, before and after robot-assisted road suggestions or read more about it on the OSM wiki.
In this tutorial I’ll show how to view robot-suggested additions to OSM with RapiD, save them to the map, get your data back out with Protomaps Extracts, and use the resulting data in QGIS. I’ll also show how RapiD can be used with popular OSM tools like Maproulette and HOT Tasking Manager, for when you want to help build the map but you’re not sure what to do.
