The Republic of South Sudan, a nation that will be officially born in July of this year, undoubtedly has a trying road ahead of it. Beyond the struggles of forging a new, stable nation, the country must face the shadows of its past, which will mean addressing its great need for infrastructure, humanitarian aid, and more. These struggles are and will be difficult, but tools like Google Map Maker may be making the path a little easier.
In establishing an effective infrastructure and distributing humanitarian aid, one of the challenges faced by the region is a lack of up-to-date maps. To help remedy this, the Google Map Maker team partnered with a number of groups, including the World Bank and UNOSAT, to help educate Sudanese on how to use the Map Maker utility. Map Maker allows users to make their own additions or corrections to local maps and regional maps, allowing for greater accuracy and adaptability than those maps would otherwise have.
Attendees of the event, which included many former residents of South Sudan, were taught how to use Map Maker and collectively made several hundred edits. These edits will, as normal, go through an approval process at Google, but once accepted will be visible in both Google Maps and Google Earth. The educated users, in turn, will return to their home communities and enlist the assistance of others, becoming educators in this mapping project.
To further assist the Republic of South Sudan in accurate and largely autonomous map making, Google also provided new satellite images of the region. This includes a total of 125,000 square kilometers (roughly 50,000 square miles), and overs several priority areas declared by the UN.
[via the Official Google Blog]
