Mapping Georgia from scratch

TSMINDA TSKALI, Georgia — Finding your way around Georgia can be a tricky affair.

The only maps available are obsolete Soviet maps, expensive collector maps or nearly-useless outdated tourist maps of the major cities. There are no maps of the bus routes in the capital city. No maps of the new highways. And no comprehensive maps available on the internet.

As it is, Google Maps shows Georgia as an empty, light gray swath of territory squeezed between Turkey, Russia and the Black Sea, devoid of highways or train tracks or rivers. Its absence from Google Maps is a dubious honor shared only with North Korea, where an authoritarian regime has refused to share government maps, and actively thwarted cartographers from entering its borders.

In Georgia, the lack of data has more to do with the tiny country’s history of violence, political unrest and the general disorganization of a post-Soviet state in transition, but regardless of the reasons, one U.S.-funded NGO, Open Maps Caucasus, has taken the mapping of Georgia into its own hands.

The plan? “The idea is to teach people all over Georgia how to make accurate, street-level maps of the places they live,” said Austin Cowley, one of five founders of the organization. “Our other goal is to actually make an accurate, street-level map of the entire country that will be useful to the people who live here.”

The map from Open Maps, which will be completed by the end of this month, will be an open-source map — meaning anyone can contribute to it, edit it and tweak it to their needs: It’s Wikipedia-meets-cartography, developing world-style.

The implications of Open Maps’ work — both the creation of a grassroots, map-making community, and the legacy of an online, open-source map itself — are yet to be seen. Initially, they’ll probably be used for traditional navigational and transportation needs, and in businesses and tourism development.

“And then there will be uses in research, environmental development, agricultural development and in facilitating the distribution of humanitarian aid,” said Jeff Haack, another founder of the organization.

“Because there’s not a lot of familiarity with [open-source maps], a lot of the future uses are just conceptual at this point. As people discover this map as a tool, they’ll come up with innovative uses for it,” he said. 

In the past few years, open source maps have been used to monitor election fraud in Kenya, to track the devastation of the earthquake in Haiti, and to organize democratic protests in Iran. Before coming to Georgia to work with Open Maps this summer, Jeff Warren, an MIT masters candidate, used kites and enormous latex balloons to map the spread of the Gulf oil spill.

The actual process of mapping Georgia was a mixture of the painstaking and the fun. In some cases, Open Maps helped community members rig up amateur aerial photography contraptions using a point-and-shoot digital camera, a sawed-off Pepsi bottle and either a kite or a giant helium balloon — the result of which looks like something MacGyver would have come up with in a pinch.

But for the most part, the mapping process simply involved a small team of Open Maps employees — a mixture of Georgians and foreigners — teaching lots of Georgian volunteers, community members and school kids how to make maps using a GPS device. Then, over the course of six months, those volunteers, community members and school kids, simply walked, hiked, drove, scooted, biked and ATV’d the streets, allies, highways and rural roads around their homes, with GPS devices in their pockets.

The resulting data was then loaded into free (and also open-source) map-making software which pieced together what Haack called "a breadcrumb trail" of the roads, streets and highways that constitute the skeleton of the map. That breadcrumb trail was then filled in with more information, like monuments, hospitals, schools and parks. 

While Open Maps was able to use some maps from the Georgian public registry, a handful of out-dated Soviet maps and a few maps created by other NGOs, its map-making process basically began from scratch, Haack said. “To be honest, most of the data that already existed wasn’t very useful,” he said. “For almost all of our data set, people were actually out there on the roads.” 

When Open Maps’ community-based, open-source map of Georgia is completed in late August, it will be the first comprehensive, open-source map of the country.