Mapathon: IIT Bombay Invites Applications For Online Map-Making Competition

Mumbai: IIT Bombay has invited applications from Indian nationals for a unique map-making competition titled ‘Mapathon’.

The online competition will be conducted in collaboration with AICTE.

Registration for the contest opened on February 1 and will continue till February 12. Participants will have to make their submissions between February 15 and March 7, while results will be declared after March 15.

Participants will be judged on the basis of their creativity and expertise in making thematic maps. They will have to develop new tools or methods to improve accuracy and usefulness of maps for a community.

The primary objective of the contest was to understand the potential of open source mapping and maps for Indian regions, and to build capacity for the same, IIT Bombay said in a notification.

The contest also aims to develop indigenous capacity to customise and employ mapping to resolve societal challenges and create new opportunities for young India.

Participants can develop maps from openly available geospatial datasets using Free Open Source Software (FOSS), like QGIS, in a bid to encourage large-scale usage of maps in various thematic areas.

They will collectively work in a crowd sourcing method for jointly producing thematic maps of India.

Participants can visit https://iitb-aicte-mapathon.fossee.in/ to check details.