News — 20 December, 2018

1 Year & 1 Hundred-Thousand Kilometers with HOT & Facebook

Partnering with Facebook, the HOT Indonesia team has added about 125,000 kilometers (80,000 miles) of road to Indonesia so far.

It has now been a little over a year since we began partnering with Facebook to map the road network of Indonesia. In December of 2017 a team in our Jakarta office began cleaning up the existing road network as preparation for filling the gaps using a machine learning technique developed by Facebook.

While the AI assisted roads created by the Facebook team helped to speed up mapping, it was an educated guess on how long it would take to review and merge the results for all of Indonesia. Given much of our timeline is also dictated by the local community.

The HOT Indonesia team is currently adding about 20,000 kilometers (12,500 miles) of road network per month on average to OpenStreetMap; adding-up-to ~125,000 kilometers (80,000 miles) of road network to Indonesia so far.

The team has also focussed on mapping for disaster response when we teamed up with the Facebook mapping team to map in Kerala, India during the severe flooding this year and, as you may be aware, there was a powerful earthquake and tsunami that hit Sulawesi island, Indonesia in late September. Although we had finished the road network on the island, a buildings mapping project was needed for the local disaster management agencies. Facebook had no qualms with our team helping to validate the data from that mapping response.

As we look at this project in 2019, Facebook will continue putting effort into OpenStreetMap as they now use it in their products globally. Although Indonesia will eventually be mapped, we know there are many more places on earth that the road network could utilize this workflow to complete it quickly. Therefore, we will be adding some of our mappers in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to the team to help finish Indonesia. This will give them some exposure, training and experience working with an AI-assisted mapping workflow. Perhaps this team could next lead an effort in Tanzania or more broadly to complete the road network in Africa.