NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) – Hosted by CIESIN at Columbia University

Global Roads (gROADS)

News and Updates

Those wishing to receive regular updates on gROADS, or to exchange information on roads data sources, are invited to sign up for the ROADSDATA discussion list.

April 2011

Mikel Maron, member of the CODATA Roads Task Group and a lead on Map Kibera and Ground Truth Initiative visited us at CIESIN today (April 21), and gave a really inspiring presentation on the work of Map Kibera (a slum mapping and community building activity in Kibera Slum, Kenya), and also told us about the great work of Humanitarian OSM Team . Thank you Mikel!  The CODATA Roads group will be looking at ways of partnering on roads data collection.

Last week, Task Group vice chair person Glenn Hyman and member Sives Govendar attended a Panel Session on Geospatial Science and Technology Networks of Expertise in Africa, where Glenn presented an update on the CODATA Roads initiative. Click here to download the presentation.  

November 2010 Update

Good news!  The CODATA Global Roads Data Development Working Group has been upgraded to Task Group status by the 27th CODATA General Assembly at its recent meeting in Stellenbosch, South Africa in October. More information on the composition of the Task Group will be announced shortly. More information on CODATA Task Groups can be found at http://www.codata.org/ .

Also, the alpha version of the gROADS v1 data set is now available for review. See the last comment for information on how to be an alpha tester.

October 2010

Greg Yetman of CIESIN will be presenting a paper entitled "The Global Roads Open Access Data Set (gROADS): Pilot Efforts to Develop Improved Roads Data " at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI-12), 18-22 October 2010, in Singapore. The paper, coauthored with Alex de Sherbinin (CIESIN) and Matt Steil (World Resources Institute), describes multiple approaches to developing improved roads data.

For those who are checking this site periodically, we should have an alpha version of the gROADS data set available for testing by the end of October 2010.  Please contact Alex de Sherbinin at adesherbinin *at* ciesin *dot* columbia *dot* edu if you are interested in testing the data set.

May 2010

Final reports on the NASA-SERVIR (PDF, 3.3 MB) and the AGCommons (PDF, 474 KB) projects are now available. These projects are described in prior posts.  The improved Ethiopia roads data coming out of these initiatives are being incorporated into the soon-to-be-released gROADS v.1 data sets.

Also, the catalog of roads data sets (v.1) has been released and is available from the Data Downloads page.

November 2009 Update

The Global Roads Open Access Data Set (gROADS) version 1 data set will be released in early 2010. gROADS v.1 is being developed under the auspices of the CODATA Global Roads Data Development Working Group (CODATA Roads). The majority of input data for version 1 of gROADS will be derived from the Geographic Information Support Team (GIST) Global Map roads data set developed by the Information Technology Outreach Services (ITOS) of the University of Georgia with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The CODATA-Roads working group acknowledges in advance the contributions of GIST, ITOS, and USAID to this first release of the gROADS data set.

CODATA Roads will soon release a catalog of national level roads data sets, and is developing a stand alone web site. Visit again in December for the catalog.

In other news, the AGCommons Ethiopia Roads Project will be coming to completion in January 2010. For more information please visit a blog posting featuring interviews with IMMAP colleagues Olivier Cottray and Anna Schemper. This pilot project is generating innovative methods that will be replicated in other parts of Africa - expressions of interest have come from the National Univeristy of Rwanda and the Gates Funded Africa Soil Mapping Project.

The NASA-SERVIR project is also near completion. For more on this project, see the last posting in June. A global road mapping software for use with ASTER and imagery is being developed for web implementation. 

June 2009 Update

CIESIN hosted a workshop of the CODATA Global Roads Data Development Working Group from 22-23 June, including representatives from the Center for Spatial Information Science (CSIS) at the University of Tokyo, the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development (Kenya), and the Geographic Information Support Team at the University of Georgia (USA). Additional working group members from around the world participated by teleconference on 23 June. The workshop included a review of a software tool developed by CSIS for semi-automated road feature extraction from ASTER imagery (funded by the NASA SERVIR project), and presentation of a PDA-based tool for roads data collection in Ethiopia (funded by the Gates Foundation AGCommons project). Working Group co-chairs Alex de Sherbinin and Olivier Cottray gave a status report on the implementation plan, and the working group provided advice on licensing and other issues.

March 2009 Update

  1. The IMMAP, CIESIN and RCMRD "quick win" proposal for roads data development in Ethiopia using GPS technologies was accepted by the AGCommons project of the Gates Foundation. The project will be getting underway shortly, with deliverables scheduled by the close of 2009. IMMAP will be working over the coming months to develop a UNSDI-T compliant GPS-enabled PDA that can be used by international agency teams traveling in Ethiopia, as well as by some World Food Programme teams (where the international agencies are unable to cover certain regions), to develop road data with attribute information. CIESIN will be involved in data cleaning and data fusion (using the ASTER derived imagery from the SERVIR project), and RCMRD will be helping to develop capacity among its member states to use the tool in other parts of East Africa.
  2. CIESIN's team of three RAs is working on data cleaning for a number of countries in East Africa. The team has developed a methodology for data cleaning and integration. In addition, CIESIN will soon be distributing a catalog of 200 roads data sets (mostly national level but also including some regional and global collections). Those interested in this should contact Alex de Sherbinin at CIESIN.
  3. CODATA-Roads partners led by Koki Iwao of AIST have developed an alpha version of a Global Road Mapping tool that will be freely disseminated. The tool currently enables semi-automated road feature extraction using ASTER imagery. AIST is also working on a WFS-Transactional "wiki mapping" environment using Geoserver.
  4. CODATA-Roads (represented by Alex de Sherbinin) met with Mikel Maron of OpenStreetMap to discuss collaboration and the state-of-play with the two projects. OSM is moving forward concertedly in Africa, and the results are impressive. See Mikel's recent blog posting at the OpenGeoData blog.
  5. CODATA-Roads (represented by Olivier Cottray) was represented at the CODATA Steering Committee meeting on February 28 in Paris.
  6. For those interested in road feature extraction using Google Earth, a recent article by David Potere answers the question, How accurate are those high resolution images anyway?  In general, the assessment is quite favorable. For more, read the article in the open access journal Sensors (see http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/8/12/7973). 

January 2009 Update

Andy Nelson, a member of the CODATA Roads Working Group, has recently released a global accessibility map.  The map is based on VMAP0 and is indicative of one kind of application that will be useful to the community at large once a globally improved public domain roads data set is made available.  See: http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/description.htm

 December 2008 Update

  1.  Working closely with IMMAP, CIESIN submitted a "quick win" proposal for roads data development in Ethiopia using GPS technologies to the AGCommons project funded by the Gates Foundation.  If funded, we'll be working very quickly over the first part of 2009 to develop a UNSDI-T compliant GPS-enabled PDA that can be used by international agency teams traveling in Ethiopia, as well as by some IMMAP teams (where the international agencies are unable to cover certain regions), to develop road data with attribute information. CIESIN will be involved in data cleaning and data fusion (using the ASTER derived imagery from the SERVIR project) with RCMRD in Nairobi.
  2. Based on feedback received, we settled on the acronym gROADS for Global Roads Open Access Data Set. We've reserved the URL www.groads.org for the CODATA-Roads initiative, which currently links to the wiki, but eventually will become a stand alone site.
  3. We've begun the first approach to a developing country agency for access to a roads data set. This was facilitated by contacts we have there at the national university.  We have had some preliminary correspondence, but we have yet to receive a decision from them. I am hopeful that our request to incorporate the roads developed by the university and the Ministry of Transportation into gROADS will be approved.
  4. Two research assistants at CIESIN (Steffen Foerster and Paola Kim Blanco) are working on data cleaning (mainly topology, but also some attribute information). Substantial progress has been made on cleaning a GPS-derived data set for Kenya, and a VMAP0 map of Ethiopia has been completed. We've begun work on data fusion of data from Africacover and VMAP0 for Tanzania.
  5. Colleagues in Japan (lead by Koki Iwao of AIST) and are making good progress on the development of a tool for eventual distribution that will permit semi-automated extraction of road features from ASTER mosaics. They are also looking seriously at the development of a WFS-Transactional collaborative mapping environment.  
  6. JRC and World Bank publish global accessibility map:  A new global map released today by the Joint Research Centre and published in the World Bank's World Development Report 2009 measures urbanisation in the new perspective of Travel Time to 8,500 Major Cities. The map fills an important gap in our understanding of economic, physical and even social connectivity. In the absence of agreement on the meaning of "urbanisation", the European Commission and the World Bank are proposing a new definition based on a unique mapping of "Accessibility" called the Agglomeration Index. In this context, the new map, developed at the JRC's Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES), uses travel-time as a unit of measurement, representing accessibility through the easily understood concept of "how long will it take to get there?" Accessibility links people with places, goods with markets and communities to vital services. Accessibility - whether it is to markets, schools, hospitals or water - is a precondition for the satisfaction of almost any economic need. Furthermore, accessibility is relevant at all levels, from local development to global trade. For more information visit: http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/index.htm

November 2008 Update

Here is the latest on the CODATA Global Roads Data Development Working Group.

An implementation plan for 2008-2010 is now available for download. This plan includes two main components. The first step is to compile a composite global road coverage based upon best available sources. The data set will be known as the Global Roads Data Set (GRDS). The second step is to develop a wiki mapping environment that permits the wider community, including national and international agencies, to edit the base map, thereby contributing new data and serving to keep the GRDS up-to-date. The plan foresees substantial collaboration with other mapping efforts such as Open Street Map and the Global Roads Inventory Project.

In addition, the group has elected a new member, Nicolas Chavent, lately of UN-Joint Logistics Centre, and an expert in roads data needs for humanitarian applications. It is becoming apparent that this is the highest priority user community, so the working group will be working closely with agencies involved in post-disaster response and humanitarian operations. In a mutually beneficial arrangement, the working group will work on longer term build up of the data base through cataloging and validation of existing data sets, while humanitarian agencies will pass data to the working group for evaluation purposes, and possible integration into the GRDS. GPS data from field operations may also be integrated.

August 2008 Update

1. The CODATA Roads Data Development working group has been approved as an activity of United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID).

2. CIESIN submitted a small ($26k) proposal to CATHALAC, which runs NASA's SERVIR project, for a roads data development activity in East Africa. In principle the money has been committed and it is only a matter of setting up a contract. The first task will be to work on automated road extraction using ASTER imagery in central Ethiopia. This will be done by colleagues at University of Tokyo with data from the ASTER archive, provided by Koki Iwao at AIST (a CODATA WG member).

3. Meetings between Alex de Sherbinin (CIESIN) and Nicolas Chavent and colleagues at UN-Joint Logistics Center took place in Rome on 22 July. There appears to be significant synergies between the CODATA working group and UN-JLC activities in support of the UN Spatial Data Infrastructure-Transport Layer (UNSDI-T), and close cooperation is likely.

4. Version 2 of the UNSDI-Transport model was recently published by UNJLC.

5. Koki and Alex presented a poster (PDF 105KB) on the CODATA roads working group at the Global Mapping Forum in Tokyo from 3-5 June.

6. CIESIN has begun the national roads data set catalog under SEDACfunding, focusing first on Africa, and moving next to Latin America. We are developing methods for measuring the quality of data sets against some objective standard, e.g., GPS tracks or Geocover. Johann Groenwald of Tracks4Africa has indicated that they will provide GPS tracks for certain countries as a control for the candidate data sets. If data sets are determined to be of relatively high quality or at least an improvement on VMAP0, we would then seek permissions.

February 2008 Update

The CODATA Executive Committee officially approved our application for a Roads Data Development working group. More information can be obtained here:http://www.codata.org/taskgroups/WGglobalroads/ 

January 2008 Update

There are a number of efforts afoot to create data using "crowd sourcing". Here are the ones that have come to my attention:

  1. There is an effort by the New Mexico Consortium to develop global maps of energy infrastructure through a community approach, including railroads (for which they don't yet have data). It is based entirely on Google Earth, and hence I suppose there is a problem insofar as the imagery in GE are not orthorectified. Still, it is worth keeping tabs on this approach. http://openmodel.newmexicoconsortium.org/ (October 2012 Update - project no longer accessible);
  2. Uwe Deichmann at the World Bank sent around an _Economist _article this week describing efforts to harness volunteer's computers and time to do what would have formerly have been prohibitively time consuming or computing intensive. Examples include categorizing all the known galaxies by shape. But the part that is relevant to us is the following excerpt - see also http://africa-at-home.web.cern.ch/ for more information. "To lower the barrier to entry for projects like this, Dr Anderson recently launched a new open-source platform called BOSSA (Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation), which aims to do for ?distributed thinking? what BOINC has done for distributed computing. One of Dr Anderson's first customers for BOSSA is Peter Amoako-Yirenkyi of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, who is working with other African researchers and a research group called UNOSAT, which processes digital-satellite data for various United Nations agencies. The project, which is part of an initiative called Africa@home co-ordinated by the University of Geneva, will enlist volunteers to extract useful cartographic information - the positions of roads, villages, fields and so on - from satellite images of regions in Africa where maps either do not exist or are hopelessly out of date. This will help regional planning authorities, aid workers and scientists documenting the effects of climate change. Dr Amoako-Yirenkyi is excited by the prospects such projects open up for African researchers. 'We can leapfrog expensive data centres, and plug directly into a global computer,' he says. Rather than fretting about a digital divide, researchers in developing countries stand to benefit from this digital multiplication effect."
  3. Olivier Cottray met with some people at Harvard developing something called the bright Earth Project, which involves real time information tagging for humanitarian organizations. Here is his report: "I just met Patrick Webb this afternoon and discussed with him a very interesting project he is involved in, developing a Humanitarian version of the sensor web movement. This is a fast developing geo-wiki environment that might well fit the bill for the participatory phase of the Global Roads data project. Clearly there are a few similar options that we will need to consider, but this is a growing framework wich could be of wide applicability (ie; not just humanitarian but also all the other interest groups involved). More information on this at: http://brightearthproject.org/?p=19 " 

A Roads Workshop was held at the 25th Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) Meeting in Honolulu on 24 January2008. The workshop was organized by Chris Elvidge of the National Geophysical Data Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), USA, and Koki Iwao of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology Grid Technology Research Center, Japan.

Dr. Elvidge presented a paper by Alex de Sherbinin of CIESIN, Columbia University, outlining the Global Roads Strategy (600KB, PDF).

A summary report (743KB, PDF) of the workshop results can be found here.

A novel roads extraction algorithm has been developed by Drs. Shibasaki and Shi at the University of Tokyo. Here is a PDF document of their presentation.

Here is further information from Chris Elvidge:

A workshop on satellite remote sensing for the Global Roads initiative was held at the 25th meeting of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) in Honolulu, HI on January 24, 2008. Global Roads is a project to produce an openly available roads database worldwide to address disaster planning and response, to improve economic investment planning, and to stimulate economic development. An initial Global Roads workshop was held at the Lamont Campus of Columbia University in October 2007. During this follow-up January 24 workshop, results on automated and manual road extraction techniques and data were presented by the University of Tokyo and NGDC. Direct comparisons were made for multispectral Advanced Space-borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) images at 15-meter resolution and Landsat images at 30-meter multispectral / 10-meter panchromatic. The results indicated that the ASTER images are superior to the Landsat images for the extraction of road features. The University of Tokyo algorithms for automated road extraction were found to be superior to the algorithms available in the commercially-available Environment for Visualizing Images (ENVI) toolkit recently tested by NGDC. The workshop was co-chaired by Dr Elvidge and a representative from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). AIST holds a copy of the ASTER archive and has built a GRID computing architecture suitable for the extraction of global roads data from ASTER imagery.

Significance: Workshop recommendations are to build an initial global roads database using currently-available, open-source roads data, to extract roads from orthorectified ASTER data in gap areas, to develop a consortium to label the roads and add metadata using an online tool (such as www.openstreetmap.org), and to seek a collaboration with one or more virtual globe systems (such as Google Earth) to gain access to higher resolution imagery suitable for identifying roads in urban areas.