crowdsourced GIS

OpenSfM in action

The Future of Street Level Photos in Mapping

August 12, 2024

GIS Contributor

Using mobile phones, 360-degree cameras, car dashboards and helmet cameras, Mapillary’s users take geo-tagged pictures of the roads they travel which the app automatically uploads to Mapillary’s platform. Then, Mapillary stitches the photos together and turns them into an immersive, navigable, street level view of the world.

Kibera geographic data collection via OpenStreetMap

Black Holes No More: The Emergence of Volunteer Geographic Information

May 26, 2015

GIS Contributor

This essay by Ron Mahabir takes a look at how crowdsourced mapping efforts are helping to fill in much needed geographic information about impoverished areas around the world.

iSPEX map compiled from all iSPEX measurements performed in the Netherlands on July 8, 2013, between 14:00 and 21:00. Each blue dot represents one of the total of 6007 measurements that were submitted that day. At each location on the map, the 50 nearest iSPEX measurements were averaged and converted to Aerosol Optical Thickness, a measure for the total amount of atmospheric particles. This map can be compared to the AOT data from the MODIS Aqua satellite, which flew over the Netherlands at 16:12 local time. The relatively high AOT values were caused by smoke clouds from forest fires in North America, that were blown over the Netherlands at an altitude of 2-4 km. In the course of the day, the northerly winds brought clearer air to the northern provinces.

Using Citizens to Map Atmospheric Particulates

October 29, 2014

Caitlin Dempsey

By leveraging data from over 8,000 smartphone users, Dutch researchers successfully mapped atmospheric particulate levels.

Mapping the Outbreaks of Diseases

September 23, 2014

Rebecca Maxwell

In August of 2014, the World Health Organization declared a public emergency in response to the growing number of Ebola ...

Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda): The Mapping Response from the Tech Community

November 14, 2013

Jack Pitts

Typhoon Haiyan (locally referred to as ‘Yolanda’[1]) made landfall in the Philippines on Friday November 8th 2013. Officially, 1839 people ...

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