Tomnod was a project owned by Colorado-based satellite company

DigitalGlobe DigitalGlobe was an American commercial vendor of space imagery and geospatial content, and operator of civilian remote sensing spacecraft. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 14 May 2009, selling 14.7 million shares at U ...

that used

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 digit ...

to identify objects and places in satellite images. It was announced Tomnod was no longer using crowdsourcing of images as of 1 August 2019.

History

Originally a research project of the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

in 2010, Tomnod (Mongolian for "big eye") was founded by Shay Har-Noy, Luke Barrington, Nate Ricklin and Albert Yu Min Lin. Three years later, Tomnod was acquired by the company DigitalGlobe while incubating at EvoNexus. Tomnod used online map interfaces that engage many people to each view and tag a small section of a large area on the planet. In 2011 Tomnod cooperated with the

UNHCR The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and Humanitarian protection, protect refugees, Internally displaced person, forcibly displaced communities, and Statelessness, s ...

to locate refugee camps in Somalia. Users were asked to use satellite images to count the shelters of refugees. Other projects include searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan, mapping damage after

Typhoon Haiyan Typhoon Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Super Typhoon Yolanda, was an extremely powerful and catastrophic tropical cyclone that is among List of the most intense tropical cyclones, the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded. Upon ...

, and searching for

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370/MAS370) was an international passenger flight operated by Malaysia Airlines that disappeared from radar on 8 March 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia to its planned de ...

Finding wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Starting in March 2014 Tomnod took images gathered by DigitalGlobe satellites and offered them to the public for viewing and identification in the disappearance of

. Over 8 million people used the site to look for signs of wreckage, oil spills and other objects of interest. Prior to this search effort Tomnod had 10,000 contributors for other projects on the site. Users could tag images which are later reviewed with algorithms. The site was down on 11 and 12 March due to high traffic (100,000 visits per minute). It was reported that over 650,000 "objects of interest" had been tagged by users on Tomnod and that their maps had been viewed over 98 million times. Originally Tomnod had included 24,000 km² of satellite imagery for users to search. Later they included maps of 14,000 km² of the

Straits of Malacca The Strait of Malacca is a narrow stretch of water, long and from wide, between the Malay Peninsula to the northeast and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the southwest, connecting the Andaman Sea (Indian Ocean) and the South China Sea (Pa ...

and the

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or approximately 20% of the water area of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia (continent), ...

as new information was released.

References

External links

* {{DigitalGlobe, state=autocollapse Crowdsourcing University of California, San Diego

History

Finding wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

See also

References

External links