Ulaanbaatar City’s ‘Smart City’ project, funded by ICT, aims to enable city residents to get access to information regarding public services, and send comments, reports, and request to relevant officials.

Ulaanbaatar City’s ‘Smart City’ project, funded by ICT, aims to enable city residents to get access to information regarding public services, and send comments, reports, and request to relevant officials via the Internet in the Capital City of Mongolia.

To achieve this, there is a need to map Ulaanbaatar in a comprehensive manner including the locations and characteristics of roads, other basic urban infrastructure such as solid waste collection points, street lighting, bus stops, key government and private (landmark) buildings, parks, service delivery centers (hospitals, schools, universities etc).

The World Bank Information Communication and Technology asked the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) to provide trainings and support to the Ulaanbaatar city government and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology (MUST) to map specific areas in Ulaanbaatar and ensure the city government and MUST have the necessary skills to continue map the entire city.

Early October, an introduction of OSM will be provided to the Ulaanbaatar city government and MUST students. The most interested students will then be trained with City staff during a initial workshop run by two HOT trainers in order to learn all OSM concepts, how to trace over high resolution aerial imagery, make field mapping with GPS devices, smartphones, cameras, maps and forms, as well as online editing and quality checks.

Then, during 5 weeks until mid-November, the students will map specific areas in Ulaanbaatar with the technical support of HOT, following a learn-by-doing approach already applied in various countries. As efficiency and quality will increase by practising, it would be ideal to have the students involved all along the project, almost full time. As a result, they will become together a proficient OSM community for Mongolia, mastering the OSM environment to create their own applications based on OSM (IT students) or use the OSM data as a decisive source of information for urban planning purposes (Civil Engineering and Architecture students).