PoliMappers is a student association of Politecnico di Milano, Italy and a YouthMappers chapter. The mission of PoliMappers is to train and motivate the next generation of volunteer mappers. The association organizes internal monthly meetings to perform either field mapping (e.g. at our university campus) or remote mapping as well as training on OpenStreetMap (OSM) tools. Our future activities will also include teaching mapping within primary and secondary schools.
PoliMappers had a unique opportunity to do mapping for cultural heritage in a Maptime event. Maptime Milan is a monthly learning environment and meeting for map nerds, geo-geeks, and spatially-oriented people in Milan. Maptime vol XIII took place on March 30, 2017 at the Opendot FabLab in Milan, Italy. In addition to PoliMappers, Wikimedia Italia (the official OSM Italian chapter) and GIStonic-Milano were also invited. The event, which lasted from 4 to 10 pm, started with an opening speech of Prof. Daniele Villa (Politecnico di Milano), who introduced participants to the project OD4CH - Open Data for Cultural Heritage, the focus of Maptime’s mapping task. The main goals of this project are to test, evaluate and boost the role of ICT and Web-based/open spatial information systems in the fields of heritage preservation and reuse, cultural landscape information communication and planning, history of architecture and cultural heritage and raise awareness in the use of open data for cultural heritage.
Afterwards Mr. Alessandro Palmas, the OpenStreetMap project manager for Wikimedia Italia introduced its organization and related activities. Dr. Marco Minghini, PoliMappers faculty advisor, introduced YouthMappers, PoliMappers, our mission, past and future activities. Finally all participants (about 50 people) mapped to contribute to the OD4CH project. Wikimedia Italia had previously created an ad hoc mapping task, focused on the area of Corte Sant’Andrea (Italy) on its local Tasking Manager instance. Participants, who were recommended to use the JOSM editor, were divided into two different groups in order to split the mapping task and thus work more efficiently. In particular, one group was in charge of adding buildings and other details visible from aerial and satellite imagery (including local high resolution imagery), while the other group was asked to add any other detail visible in some Mapillary photos available for the area. Participants were asked to include the hashtag #od4ch-Milano in the changeset comments.
In addition to increasing our mapping skills, this experience was very rewarding from the social point of view, as we got to know each other better and meet other map enthusiasts in Milan. Last but not least, the event ended with free pizza offered by the awesome CARTO. Overall it was an amazing event and, once more, we want to thank the organizers for inviting us and Opendot for hosting the event!
Maptime participants committed to mapping
The PoliMappers team while eating a well-deserved pizza!