Kochi: Open street mapping helps in Covid fight

KOCHI: District administration had to turn to the open street mapping (OSM) community for a ward-level GIS map of Kochi corporation, essential for effective management of containment zones, as the stakeholder departments refused to share the files publically.
The necessity of a wardlevel data was felt after Covid-19 containment strategy moved to ward-level instead of locking out entire local bodies.
“Several departments, including the local self-government (LSG) and revenue, are custodians of map data but they don’t share them,” said a source.The lack of coordination between various departments and the penchant to keep data in silos instead of sharing them openly is a major issue for many departments.
An official with the IT department said the health department refuses to share data with them. Departments like LSG and revenue also shy away from sharing GIS datasets they possess with agencies like Kerala State Disaster Management Agency (KSDMA). Ideally such datasets should have been publically shared through the state data portal.
“In Kochi, the map would be useful in correctly identifying the ward-level boundaries and roads that need to be blocked,” said Bodhish Thomas, architect of Coronosafe network, an IT project created to assist the administration. According to him, it was difficult to redraw the containment zones on layer when the wards changed. They sought the help of OSM community following the advice of sub-divisional magistrate Snehil Kumar Singh.
“I had to do this with only a JPEG image as base. It had no quality but there was nothing else to refer to,” said Manoj Karingamadathil, an OSM enthusiast who volunteered to design the ward-level map of Kochi corporation.
Karingamadathil drew the shapefiles needed to mark the boundaries of all the 74 wards of the corporation and also validated it with the information regarding roads and streams available in the Google Map. “It is not exact but it can be improved as it is a vector file and anyone with better information can fine-tune it by moving the nodes,” he said. The wardlevel map can be loaded with any kind of data making it a public utility.