Harnessing the potential of crowd sourcing for geospatial inventorying in disaster response

using Open Source Geospatial Tools

What is it?

• Crowdsourcing is the practice of outsourcing tasks to a broad, loosely defined external group of people. The idea is generally to introduce new or more developed skill sets or a larger work force to achieve some specific goal.

• The term was first coined in 2006 by Wired magazine author Jeff Howe in an article titled "The Rise of Crowdsourcing."

Other Name of Crowd Sourcing in GIS

• Neo-Geography• Volunteered Geographic Information• Collaboration GIS

Some Examples• Possibly, the earliest example of Crowd Sourcing is the collection of

words for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In 1858, a group called the Philological Society contracted with over 800 volunteer readers to collect words from all available books and document their usages. Subsequently, the group solicited broader public input and received over six million submissions over the 70 years of the project.

• In 1936, Toyota held a contest seeking a new logo design. The winning design from over 26,000 entries remained the company's corporate logo until 1989.

• Wikipedia launched as a collaboratively written and edited online encyclopaedia in January 2001. Free registration enabled anyone to submit or edit an entry. The multilingual site now hosts several million entries in English alone.

Mapping Using Crowd Sourcing

Wikimapia

Mapping Using Crowd Sourcing

Open Street Map

Mapping Using Crowd Sourcing

Mapping Using Crowd Sourcing

How it Works

• Feature Service• User Input

Crowd Sourcing can Provide Solutions where…..

Maps are OLD

Crowd Sourcing can Provide Solutions where…..

We have No funds

Crowd Sourcing can Provide Solutions where…..

Survey becomes really a very Time Consuming Process & resulting in a Low Output

Disaster Management

Disaster Management

• Natural Disaster.• Man – Made Disaster.

Planning after Disaster Management

• Send team to ground for data collection• Acquire data in proper format, distribute to

concerned department.• Plan evacuation• Send teams on ground.

Undesired Outcome of Planning after Disaster Management

Unplanned Survey = Time = Loss of Capital / Life

Crowd Sourcing and Disaster Management

User uploads data = Data for planning team

Crowd Sourcing and Disaster Management

Data(VGI) = Saves Time for Survey

Crowd Sourcing and Disaster Management

Data(VGI) = Saves life

How It Works?

PreparedData

Teams for Planning

User

Server

Processing

Limitation

Limitations

1. Non Trained Volunteers.2. Data Authentications3. Standards / Quality of Acquired Data

A homeowner who evacuated based on information from an online map created by a volunteer might be responding to a false positive, and by waiting for officials, verified information might have avoided the need to evacuate altogether. But on the other hand the delay in acquiring information from official sources might have made the difference literally between life and death.

Crowd Sourcing- A New Way!

Nokia Maps Creator

Crowd Sourcing- A New Way!

Waze- Traffic & Roads

Architect of Application using Open Source

Open Source

XML

Open Layer

Geo Server

PostGIS

Data in XML

XML

Lat

Lon

Data/Image

Cycle of Data input

User Edit

Save(x,y)

Store image/dataPostGres

Server

Aditya kumar/Manjush Koshy