Disasters seen through Flickr cameras
Proceedings of the Special Workshop on Internet and Disasters
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Tornadoes and other natural disasters frequently cause large amounts of damage to buildings and infrastructure. An important part of learning from these events is assessing key damage-indicators within the affected area. Researchers can analyze these damage-indicators to better understand the event and how to minimize future loss. These assessments require many teams of researchers, government agencies, and volunteer citizen groups to survey affected areas and collect information. Assessment teams take thousands of digital photographs for later review. When combined with GPS data, these images can be used to document and understand an extreme event. In this paper, we present Damage Tracker, a software system for capturing and managing tornado damage information. A mobile application for Android devices allows users to capture, annotate, and upload geo-tagged photos. A web application stores uploaded photos and meta-data and displays this information on an interactive map. This system allows an online community of users to easily share data, which encourages more collaboration, reduces duplicate collection efforts, and potentially improves the quality and depth of subsequent research. Damage Tracker realizes the benefits of crowdsourcing and citizen science in the context of disaster data collection.