Background

Following the political transition in December 2024, Syria entered a critical and uncertain phase marked by both opportunity and risk. After more than a decade of conflict, communities across the country faced widespread infrastructure damage, fragmented governance, and deep social strain. At the same time, there was renewed momentum among Syrians—inside the country and across the diaspora—to contribute to recovery and long-term resilience.

Reliable, up-to-date geospatial data was a foundational requirement for recovery planning. Civil society organizations, local governments, and international partners required accurate information on buildings, roads, critical services, populated places, and damaged or abandoned infrastructure to support sustainable returns, service restoration, and reconstruction. Yet years of conflict had left Syria with severe data gaps and uneven data availability across platforms, making coordination difficult and often forcing actors to rely on outdated or incomplete maps.

To address these challenges, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), with support from the H2H Network, supported a coordinated, community-driven initiative to strengthen OpenStreetMap (OSM) data and build a sustainable OSM Syria community. The project combined large-scale data improvement with local capacity building, ensuring that recovery efforts were informed by accurate, locally grounded, and openly accessible geospatial data.

Understanding the Geospatial Gaps in Syria

Syria’s conflict-altered landscape presented acute challenges for geospatial data collection and use:

• Buildings: Large gaps persisted across OSM and machine-learning-derived datasets. Even the most comprehensive automated sources were estimated to be missing nearly a quarter of buildings nationwide, while OSM coverage remained significantly lower but more precise.
• Roads: Many rural and peri-urban areas lacked complete road networks or critical attributes such as surface type and connectivity, limiting logistics planning and accessibility analysis.
• Populated places: Villages, neighborhoods, and locally used place names were inconsistently represented, particularly in rural Aleppo, Rural Damascus, and northern Syria.
• Community data: Information on services and cultural locations—including schools, healthcare, and community centres—was needed to inform decisions to return.

The fragmentation of datasets across institutions and platforms meant that actors were often working with different, incompatible versions of reality. These gaps directly affected humanitarian and recovery outcomes. According to UNHCR, over 1 million people had returned to Syria by September 2025, with many more expected if conditions improved and reconstruction scaled up. Without accurate spatial data, efforts to restore housing, education, health services, and livelihoods remained inefficient and uneven.

Participatory Mapping Grounded in Local Knowledge

Syrians, whether inside the country or part of the diaspora, played a critical role in recovery-oriented mapping. Many possessed deep knowledge of local geography, place names, infrastructure histories, and cultural landmarks—knowledge that was often absent from satellite imagery or automated datasets.

More than 100 Syrians had already expressed interest in contributing to OSM Syria. For those in the diaspora, mapping was described as a way to reconnect with their homeland—sometimes referred to as “nostalgic mapping.” By engaging both Syrians inside the country and those in the diaspora, the project helped bridge divided experiences and fostered shared ownership of recovery data.

Contributors focused on priority areas where local knowledge was strongest, such as villages of origin or regions with known damage. This approach ensured higher accuracy, preserved culturally relevant information, and reduced reliance on incomplete automated sources.

• Large-scale digitization of buildings and roads, prioritizing rural Aleppo and Rural Damascus.
• Addition and validation of schools, heritage sites, health facilities, and other critical infrastructure.
• Crowdsourced review and validation of third-party open datasets for potential integration into OSM.

In addition, HOT’s approach connected Syrian mappers with global OSM experts, creating pathways for skills transfer, leadership development, and long-term community sustainability.

Innovative Tools for Data Consolidation

To manage complex and evolving data needs, the project leveraged a range of open tools:

• HOT Tasking Manager for coordinated, large-scale mapping campaigns.
• MapSwipe to identify unmapped settlements and prioritize mapping areas.
• iD Editor and JOSM for detailed editing, validation, and attribute enrichment.
• fAIr (HOT’s AI-assisted tool) for mapping buildings and roads where high-resolution imagery was available.
• uMap for visualizing priority areas and coordinating activities among partners.

Together, these tools supported a hybrid approach that combined automation, human validation, and local expertise.

Building Trust Through Ethical Mapping

Mapping in a post-conflict context required strong ethical safeguards. At project onset, HOT and partners conducted a data protection and ethics review to determine what data could be shared openly and what should be restricted or shared through trusted channels.

Key principles included:

• Context-specific risk assessments
• Careful handling of sensitive locations
• Transparency around data use and limitations

This framework ensured that open data supported recovery without putting communities or contributors at risk.

Data Access and Use

All validated edits were published live in OpenStreetMap and made available through:

• HOT’s Data API

• Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) for country-level and thematic extracts. For Syria, users could access the filtered HDX list or select from the categories below:

  • Roads
  • Buildings
  • Waterways
  • Railways
  • Health Facilities
  • Financial Services
  • Populated Places
  • Education Facilities
  • Sea Ports
  • Airports
  • Points of Interest

Datasets not suitable for OSM—such as partner damage assessments—were shared via platforms like HDX or ESRI Living Atlas, following agreed data protection protocols.

Conclusion

Syria’s recovery depended on shared, trusted, and locally informed data. By combining community-driven mapping, ethical data practices, and open platforms, this initiative laid the groundwork for more effective recovery planning and stronger social cohesion.

OSM Syria represented more than a dataset—it became a growing network of Syrians using open geospatial data to reconnect with place, support reconstruction, and shape a more resilient future.

Cover Photo: View of the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, Syria. By Bernard Gagnon

Get Involved

Whether you were a mapper, researcher, organization, or member of the Syrian community, there were many ways to contribute.

To collaborate, volunteer, or support recovery mapping efforts in Syria or other conflict-affected contexts, stakeholders were encouraged to contact info@hotosm.org.

This project was funded by the H2H Network’s H2H Fund, which was supported by UK aid - from the British people.