ANALYSIS OF FREE ROAD DATA IN TANZANIA, UGANDA AND KENYA USING FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

Abstract. Roads are one of the most important infrastructural objects for each country. Slow development of third world countries is partially influenced by missing roads. Therefore, United Nation (UN) enlisted them inside the ninth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) whose achievement highly relies on geospatial data. Since the authoritative data for the majority of developing countries are incomplete and unavailable, the focus of this study is on free data. The conveyed research, explained in this paper, was divided in two parts. The first one refers to completeness and positional accuracy assessment of three different road data sets (freely available). The second part was focused only on OpenStreetMap (OSM) since it showed the best results in the previous stage. Thus, OSM was used to compute (in the second part of the research) and analyse the road accessibility rate within the buffer zone of two kilometers from human settlements. To locate human settlements, raster data, representing land covers were used. Results are pointing where the infrastructure is not mapped or is not present. The complete work was done using Free and Open Source Software, which is important, since the proposed procedure can be implemented by anyone.