You Can Help the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team With Its Research on Crowdsourced Damage Assessment

By: Caitlin Dempsey

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The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has partnered with several academic and outreach groups in order to research better crowdsourcing methods for collecting information on the impacts of natural disasters.  HOT recently launched three formal research experiments on crowdsourced damage assessment and is seeking volunteers interested in participating.  All three experiments have the collective aim of developing a better understanding of how volunteers determine building damage from viewing satellite imagery.

Volunteers who are interested in help HOT with its Crowdsourced Damage Assessment research have three options:

  1. Building-level assessment
  2. Damage ranks
  3. Damage comparison

There are also area-based surveys concerning damage ranks and damage comparisons that involve queries like rating the level of building damage in an area and comparing damage in two different areas.

The research experiments will continue for the next year until July 1, 2018 and HOT is partnering with the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative (SURI), the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), Heidelberg University, and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

More: Call For Participation: Crowdsourced Damage Assessment





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Caitlin Dempsey
Caitlin Dempsey is a geographer, writer, and the founder and editor of Geography Realm. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San José State University. She has been writing about geography, maps, geographic information systems (GIS), and environmental topics for more than two decades through Geography Realm and its predecessor site, GIS Lounge. Her interests include cartography, remote sensing, environmental geography, and the relationship between people and place.