Wednesday, November 17, 2010

GeoCam new app ideas for 2011

In the coming year, the GeoCam Project will develop several small apps instead of one big app.  Here are some ideas for new apps we might create in 2011.  We'd love to hear your ideas!


App 1: Group coordination.  Monitor team member positions, send geotagged messages, receive geo alerts when somebody enters a danger zone.


App 2: Search coverage heat map.  Initialize a heat map of likely victim locations from sources like Google Local business locations and USGS earthquake intensity.  Any search group, from government to an NGO or CERT team, can contribute to the map, or enter its location and skill level to learn what area it should cover to best serve the coordinated effort.


App 3: Community health and safety forum.  People at the disaster scene post questions or problems by text message.  Anyone can help, by answering a question, translating a request, extracting a place name so the request shows up on a map, classifying what help is needed, or flagging the request for urgent assistance.

1 comment:

  1. Hey -- a general version of this is a mechanical turk or ESP Game support for disaster response.

    Here is a non cell phone based version of it:
    After a disaster a number of high resolution satellite images or aerial footage are uploaded to a disaster response site. Public are asked to manually inspect images and tag them with various forms of information: damaged buildings, bodies, road damage, downed power lines, landslides, etc. a standard 3 person voting scheme is used for all data (c.f. ESP Game) to protect against garbage data. This allows for very fast parallel situational awareness. Combined with a google map building level data set, automated processes could quantify the human level data.

    this would play well with a cell phone text msg/photo based on-the-ground input app. Again, having multiple external views vetting the data could help keep quality high.

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