Disaster Ninja

Disaster Ninja is Kontur's web-based critical-event management and mapping tool, built with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) to speed up the preparation of emergency mapping campaigns. When a disaster strikes, response coordinators must decide quickly whether and where volunteers should map, a size-up that Kontur says could take from several hours to an entire working day.

The tool lists ongoing disasters from the Kontur Event Feed, sorted by exposed population, with each event's type, location, severity, area and gaps in OpenStreetMap coverage. Its core layer is Kontur Population, a global population density dataset produced with the Global Human Settlement Layer, which relies on radar and optical satellite missions, overlaid with Facebook population data and constrained with OpenStreetMap. A bivariate-layer engine maps population against OSM data to highlight urban cores, poorly mapped populated areas, local mapping activity, outdated map areas, nighttime heatwave risk and fire-service scarcity. Users can analyse any area of interest or upload their own geometries, see the most active local OSM contributors for ground-truth verification, and run reports that check OSM data quality. A notification engine sends new-event alerts to HOT's Slack, and the feed can be connected to an organisation's internal communication systems.

HOT's response coordinator reports that Disaster Ninja cuts size-up time in half; HOT used it after the 2020 Beirut explosion and the 2020 Papua New Guinea earthquake. Most functionality is free, and the front end is open source under the MIT licence.