Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Citizen-based sensing of crisis events: sensor web enablement for volunteered geographic information

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Applied Geomatics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Thanks to recent convergence of greater access to broadband connections, the availability of Global Positioning Systems in small packages at affordable prices and more participative forms of interaction on the Web (Web 2.0), vast numbers of individuals became able to create and share Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). The potential of up to six billion persons to monitor the state of the environment, validate global models with local knowledge, contribute to crisis situations awareness, and provide information that only humans can capture is vast and has yet to be fully exploited. Integrating VGI into Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) is a major challenge, as it is often regarded as insufficiently structured, documented, or validated according to scientific standards. Early instances of SDIs used to have limited ability to manage and process geosensor-based data (beyond remotely sensed imagery), which tend to arrive in continuous streams of real-time information. The current works on standards for Sensor Web Enablement fill this gap. This paper shows how such standards can be applied to VGI, thus converting it in a timely, cost-effective and valuable source of information for SDIs. By doing so, we extend previous efforts describing a workflow for VGI integration into SDI and further advance an initial set of VGI Sensing and event detection techniques. Examples of how such VGI Sensing techniques can support crisis information system are provided. The presented approach serves central building blocks for a Digital Earth’s nervous system, which is required to develop the next generation of (geospatial) information infrastructures.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Official web page available from: http://twitter.com/ (last accessed on 23rd of December 2010).

  2. Official web page available from: http://www.flickr.com/about/ (last accessed on 23rd of December 2010).

  3. Official web page available from: http://www.pachube.com/ (last accessed on 23rd of December 2010).

  4. Web page available from: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/Archives/index.html (last accessed on 23rd of December 2010).

  5. Available from: http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/ (last accessed on 23rd of December 2010).

  6. Official web page available from: http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ (last accessed on 23rd of December 2010).

  7. Official web page available from: http://www.satscan.org/ (last accessed on 23rd of December 2010).

References

  • Annoni A, Craglia M, de Roo A, San-Miguel J (2010) Earth observations and dynamic mapping: key assets for risk management. In: Konecny M, Zlatanova S and Bandrova T (eds) Geographic information and cartography for risk and crisis management. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 3–22

  • Bahree M (2008) Citizen Voices. Forbes Magazine

  • Bertsekas DP, Tsitsiklis JN (2002) Introduction to probability. Athena scientific, Massachusetts ISBN 1-886529-40-X

  • Bishr M, Mantelas L (2008) A trust and reputation model for filtering and classifying knowledge about urban growth. GeoJournal 72(3–4):229–237

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Botts M, Robin A (eds) (2007) Sensor model language. Open geospatial consortium implementation specification

  • Botts M, Percivall G, Reed C, Davidson J (2008) OGC sensor web enablement: overview and high level architecture. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4540, December, 175–190

  • Bröring A, Stasch C, Echterhoff J (eds) (2010) Sensor observation service v2.0. Open geospatial consortium implementation specification

  • Campbell AT, Eisenman SB, Lane ND, Miluzzo E, Peterson RA, Lu H, Zheng X, Musolesi M, Fodor K, Ahn GS (2008) IEEE Internet Computing 12:12–21

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clinton D (2010) OpenSearch 1.1 draft 4 specification

  • Cox SJD (ed) (2010) Observations and measurements v2.0. Open geospatial consortium abstract specification, topic 20 (also published as ISO DIS 19156:2010)

  • Craglia M (2007) Volunteered geographic information and spatial data infrastructures: when docparallel lines converge? Specialist meeting on volunteered geographic information. 13–14 December 2007. Santa Barbara

  • De Longueville B, Smith RS, Luraschi G (2009) OMG, from here, I can see the flames!—a use case of mining location based social networks to acquire spatio-temporal data on forest fires. Proceedings of the 2009 International Workshop on Location Based Social Networks, ACM (2009), 73–80

  • De Longueville B, Luraschi G, Smits P, Peedell S, De Groeve T (2010a) Citizens as sensors for natural hazards: a VGI integration workflow. Geomatica 64(1):41–59

    Google Scholar 

  • De Longueville B, Annoni A, Schade S, Ostländer N, Whitmore C (2010b) Digital Earth’s nervous system for crisis events: real-time Sensor Web Enablement of Volunteered Geographic Information. IJDE 3(3):242–259

    Google Scholar 

  • De Rubeis V, Sbarra P, Tosi P (2008) Web based macroseismic survey: fast information exchange and elaboration of seismic intensity effects in Italy. In: Landgren J, Jul S (eds) Proceeding of the 6th International ISCRAM Conference Gothenburg, Sweden. ISBN—978-91-633-4715-3. 2009

  • Echterhoff J, Everding T (eds) (2008) OpenGIS® sensor event service interface specification v0.3.0. Open Geospatial Consortium Discussion Paper

  • Elwood S (2008) Volunteered geographic information: key questions, concepts and methods to guide emerging research and practice. GeoJournal 72(3–4):133–135

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Flanagin AJ, Metzger MJ (2008) The credibility of volunteered geographic information. GeoJournal 72:137–148

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fonts O, Huerta J, Díaz L, Granell C (2010) OpenSearch-geo: the simple standard for geographic web search engines. Actas de las IV Jornadas de SIG Libre 2010 (SIG Libre 2010). Girona, Spain, Mar 2010

  • Geller G, Melton F (2008) Looking forward: Applying an ecological model web to assess impacts of climate change. Biodiversity 9(3–4):79–83

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gonçalves P (ed) (2010) OpenSearch geospatial extensions, v0.0.2. Open geospatial consortium draft implementation standard

  • Goodchild MF (2007) Citizens as voluntary sensors: spatial data infrastructure in the world of Web 2.0. IJSDIR 2:24–32

    Google Scholar 

  • Gould M (2007) Vertically interoperable geo-infrastructures and scalability. Specialist meeting on volunteered geographic information. 13–14 December 2007. Santa Barbara

  • Hughes AL, Palen L (2009) Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events. Proceeding of the 6th International ISCRAM Conference

  • ICSU (2010) Grand challenges in global sustainability research: a systems approach to research priorities for the decade. International council for science, pre-publication version, June 2010

  • Jankowski P (2009) Towards participatory geographic information systems for community-based environmental decision making. J Environ Manage 90:1966–1971

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jenks GF, Coulson M (1963) Class intervals for statistical maps. International Yearbook of Cartography 4(3):119–134

    Google Scholar 

  • Jiang M, McGill WL (2010) Human-centered sensing for crisis response and management analysis campaigns. Proceedings of the 7th International ISCRAM Conference—Seattle, USA, May 2010

  • Jones MT (2009) Unexpected change—transforming the GeoWeb for a new world. Keynote speech

  • Jürrens EH, Bröring A, Jirka S (2009) A human sensor web for water availability monitoring. Proceedings of: OneSpace 2009—2nd international workshop on blending physical and digital spaces on the internet. September 1. 2009. Berlin, Germany

  • Kulldorff M, Heffernan R, Hartman J, Assunção R, Mostashari F (2005) A space–time permutation scan statistic for disease outbreak detection. PLoS Med 2(3)

  • Lee V (1994) Volunteer monitoring: a brief history. The Volunteer Monitor 6:1

    Google Scholar 

  • Mummidi L, Krumm J (2008) Discovering points of interest from users’ map annotations. GeoJournal 72(3–4):215–227

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ostermann F, Spinsanti L, De Longueville B, Craglia M (2010) User generated geographic information and natural hazards - how volunteered geographic information can contribute to the assessment and communication of forest fire risks. GIScience 2010—Sixth international conference on Geographic Information Science Zurich, 14–17th September, 2010

  • Palen L, Vieweg S, Liu S, Hughes A (2009) Crisis in a networked world: features of computer-mediated communication in the April 16, 2007, Virginia tech event. Soc Sci Comput Rev 27(4):467–480

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sakaki T, Okazaki M, Matsuo Y (2010) Earthquake shakes twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors. WWW2010, April 26–30, 2010, Raleigh, NorthCarolina

  • Schade S, Craglia M (2010) A future sensor web for the environment in Europe. EnviroInfo2010, Cologne/Bonn, Germany

  • Schade S, Luraschi G, De Longueville B, Cox S, Díaz L (2010) Citizen as sensors for crisis events: sensor web enablement for volunteered geographic information. WebMGS 2010

  • Shah AR, Adkins JN, Baxter DJ et al (2010) Applications in data-intensive computing. In: Advances in Computers, 79, pp 1–70, Elsevier

  • Siegele L (2010) A sea of sensors. The economist—a special report on smart systems, 6th of November 2010

  • Simonis I (ed) (2006) OGC sensor alert service candidate implementation specification v0.9. Open geospatial consortium best practise

  • Simonis I, Echterhoff J (eds) (2010) Sensor observation service v2.0. Open geospatial consortium implementation specification

  • Spinsanti L, Ostermann F (2010) Validation and relevance assessment of volunteered geographic information in the case of forest fires. ValGeo Workshop, Ispra

    Google Scholar 

  • Turner A (2010) The OpenSearch geo extension (draft 2)

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the European FP7 Project no. 226487 called EuroGEOSS and the exploratory research project “Engaging citizen in the next generation Digital Earth—Case Study on Forest Fire” of Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability (JRC-IES).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Environment and Sustainability, European Commission—Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy

    Sven Schade, Frank Ostermann, Laura Spinsanti & Gianluca Luraschi

  2. Institute of New Imaging Technologies, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain

    Laura Díaz & Manoli Nuñez

  3. Earth Science and Resource Engineering, CSIRO, Perth, Australia

    Simon Cox

  4. Earth and Life Institute, Environmental Sciences, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Bertrand De Longueville

Authors
  1. Sven Schade
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Laura Díaz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Frank Ostermann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Laura Spinsanti
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Gianluca Luraschi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Simon Cox
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Manoli Nuñez
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Bertrand De Longueville
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sven Schade.

Additional information

An initial shorter version of this work was presented as a full paper at WebMGS 2010, 1st International Workshop on Pervasive Web Mapping, Geoprocessing and Services, Como, Italy (Schade et al. 2010). The authors were invited to submit an extended version to this journal. Apart from editorial changes, we included a new section on the sensing of multiple VGI platforms and an extensive discussion section on generalizing the approach towards a nervous system for the next generation of geospatial information infrastructures (Digital Earth). Pointers to related works have been extended, too.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Schade, S., Díaz, L., Ostermann, F. et al. Citizen-based sensing of crisis events: sensor web enablement for volunteered geographic information. Appl Geomat 5, 3–18 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12518-011-0056-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12518-011-0056-y

Keywords

Search

Navigation