WEBCON 4 PROPOSAL

摘要

Title of the web material: Ubiquitous Crowdsourcing for Emergency Response 1. Design concept and purpose Natural hazard and disasters have always threatened peoples' life and property. It is important to collect geospatial information before and after a disaster for emergency response. However, the capacity (or manpower) of government is very limited when the disaster is happening. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is a different way to collect pre- and post-disaster information effectively. VGI is a kind of crowdsourcing to collect geospatial data. It is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community (Wikipedia, 2014). The concept of 'crowdsourcing' changes the way of geospatial data collection for emergency response. Volunteers can spend their time and efforts for emergency mapping via different platforms. For example, DigitalGlobe has provided high resolution satellite images on Tomnod website in finding the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370; Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has provided a platform for mappers to digitize base maps for needed areas (e.g. West Africa Ebola epidemic); and last but not least, the MapGive project to connect the image providers and the Crowd mapping tasks.