Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has been mapping in Indonesia for disaster preparedness and resiliency since 2011, working with local and national responders to ensure they can get to people as quickly as possible when disaster strikes. However, one of the most crucial pieces of knowledge when responding to disasters – a detailed road network – was missing from the map outside the major cities until recently.

In September 2019, we were excited to finish a project to fill in many of those gaps through a collaboration with Facebook using AI-assisted mapping to complete the road network for Indonesia. To map the roads, our Indonesia team used Facebook’s extended iD editor (RapiD) to pull-in in portions of predicted roads, check the accuracy of the predictions and make necessary adjustments to make sure we’re providing the most accurate information - increasing the speed of manual mapping by an estimated 20%! Since September, the team has continued to map roads in the surrounding region, including Malaysia and other countries in South-East Asia, as well as Tanzania.