Creating a Base Map of Zanzibar

This is part of a series on the Industrial Training of Students on Zanzibar by Spatial Collective. You can read part one, two and three here.

Geo-services are becoming an essential part of the fabric of society and geographical information is now interwoven with many aspects of life. Key to that service is accurate, up to date, extensive base map.

Recent laudable efforts to create crowd-sourced open data on Zanzibar have shown that the quality of the data produced by the students and others, using innovative tools and methods, can achieve the quality standards required to fulfill the essential geo-data needs on the Islands.

The goal of creating a base map of Zanzibar Urban West was to teach the students about OpenStreetMap, open-source software, GPS and mobile data collection, and other technical aspects of mapping, data collection, and open data.

During this effort, the students mapped 42 shehias and added almost 15,000 points of interest, 100,000 buildings, and more than 200 kilometers of roads to the base map of Zanzibar City Urban West. An excerpt of the data is displayed below.