European Commission Joint Research Center And OpenStreetMap

Séverin Menard | Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team | May 26, 2013

Late March, just coming back from Burundi, I have been invited by Guido Lemoine from the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen – IPSC, Geospatial EMergency Management Action – GEMMA, that is part of the Joint Research Center (the European Commission’s in-house science service). The aim was to organize a one day workshop about HOT and OSM data in crisis contexts, as well as to have specific discussions with some groups or team within this huge research center located in Ispra, Italy. So yes, this is not the freshest piece of news ever published here, but anyway JRC’s interest for OpenStreetMap and concrete activities are still ongoing; thus I think this is an interesting reality for the HOT community to know about, moreover I guess this is not well-known by most of us.

So basically the morning (10AM-12PM) was dedicated to an open presentation followed by questions to all the interested departments in the IPSC conference room. More than 30 people showed up from various departments and after my presentation questions were about attributes, quality, possibility to lock data considered as updated, what is quite common regarding OSM. The INSPIRE Are3na team was also interested to find the ways to transform OSM data into INSPIRE frame. [...]