Crowdmapping is a subtype of

crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...

by which aggregation of crowd-generated inputs such as captured communications and

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

feeds are combined with

geographic data Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also call ...

to create a digital map that is as up-to-date as possible on events such as wars,

humanitarian crises A humanitarian crisis (or sometimes humanitarian disaster) is defined as a singular event or a series of events that are threatening in terms of health, safety or well-being of a community or large group of people. It may be an internal or extern ...

crime In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a State (polity), state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definit ...

elections An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operate ...

, or

natural disaster A natural disaster is "the negative impact following an actual occurrence of natural hazard in the event that it significantly harms a community". A natural disaster can cause loss of life or damage property, and typically leaves some econ ...

s. Such maps are typically created collaboratively by people coming together over the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

. The information can typically be sent to the map initiator or initiators by

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

or by filling out a form online and are then gathered on a map online automatically or by a dedicated group. In 2010,

Ushahidi Ushahidi is an open source software application which utilises user-generated reports to collate and map data. It uses the concept of crowdsourcing serving as an initial model for what has been coined as "activist mapping" - the combination o ...

released "Crowdmap" − a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

platform by which anyone can start crowdmapping projects.

Uses

Crowdmapping can be used to track fires, floods,

pollution Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change. Pollution can take the form of any substance (solid, liquid, or gas) or energy (such as radioactivity, heat, sound, or light). Pollutants, the ...

, crime, political violence, the spread of disease and bring a level of transparency to fast-moving events that are difficult for traditional media to adequately cover, or problem areas and longer-term trends and that may be difficult to identify through the reporting of individual events. During disasters the timeliness of relevant maps is critical as the needs and locations of victims may change rapidly. The use of crowdmapping by authorities can improve

situational awareness Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status. An alternative definition is tha ...

during an incident and be used to support incident response. Crowdmaps are an efficient way to visually demonstrate the geographical spread of a phenomenon.

Examples

HealthMap HealthMap is a freely accessible, automated electronic information system for monitoring, organizing, and visualizing reports of global disease outbreaks according to geography, time, and infectious disease agent. In operation since September 2006, ...

is a freely accessible, automated electronic information system in operation since 2006 that monitors, organizes, and visualizes reports of global disease outbreaks according to geography, time, and infectious disease agent that also crowdsources user data. * 2007–08 Kenyan crisis * In the

2010 Haiti earthquake A disaster, catastrophic Moment magnitude scale, magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake struck Haiti at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. The epicenter was near the town of Léogâne, Ouest (department), Ouest department, a ...

the Ushahidi crowdmapping platform was used to map more than 3584 events in close to real time, including breakout of fires and people trapped under buildings. * One week after the

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster The was a nuclear accident in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan. The proximate cause of the disaster was the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which occurred on the afternoon of 11 March 2011 and ...

in 2011 the Safecast project was launched that loaned volunteers cheap

Geiger counter A Geiger counter (also known as a Geiger–Müller counter) is an electronic instrument used for detecting and measuring ionizing radiation. It is widely used in applications such as radiation dosimetry, radiological protection, experimental ph ...

s to measure local levels of radioactivity (or volunteers purchased their own device). This data was mapped and made publicly available through their website. *

Hurricane Irene Hurricane Irene was a large and destructive tropical cyclone which affected much of the Caribbean and East Coast of the United States during late August 2011. The ninth named storm, first hurricane, and first major hurricane of the 2011 At ...

in 2011 * In 2012 the Danish daily newspaper and online title

Dagbladet Information ''Information'' (), full name: ''Dagbladet Information'' (), is a Danish newspaper published Monday through Saturday. History and profile ''Dagbladet Information'' was established and published by the Danish resistance movement in 1943 during ...

mapped the positions of surveillance cameras by encouraging readers to use a free Android and iOS app to photograph and geolocate

CCTV Closed-circuit television (CCTV), also known as video surveillance, is the use of video cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place, on a limited set of monitors. It differs from broadcast television in that the signal is not openly t ...

cameras. * In 2013, predict the reemergence of cicada swarms,

WNYC WNYC is the trademark and a set of call letters shared by WNYC (AM) and WNYC-FM, a pair of nonprofit, noncommercial, public radio stations located in New York City. WNYC is owned by New York Public Radio (NYPR), a nonprofit organization that di ...

—a public radio station in New York City—asked residents of certain areas to use sensors to track the soil temperature. The crowd-reported temperatures were displayed on a map on WNYC’s website. * April 2015 Nepal earthquake

References

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External links

Crowdmap.com
Crowdsourcing Geographic position Collaborative mapping Web mapping Emergency management

Uses

Examples

See also

References

External links