Building a volunteered geographic information system (VGIS): A mobile application for disaster management.

摘要

The explosion of web-based GIS technologies and the opening up of mapping technologies to common citizens in the past decade have resulted in a whole range of VGI communities like OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi and Wikimapia, that are used to assist emergency management operations on a large scale. However, most crowd sourced systems currently being used for disaster recovery have multiple obstacles like accessibility, ease of use, dependency on social media and requirement of special skill sets on the part of the public participants that serve as limitations to the fulfillment of the democratization potential of VGI.;Hence an improved Android mobile application was developed which is much more accessible, usable, reliable without any dependency on social media like Facebook to collect and transmit data, thus not only ensuring participation equality but also universal accessibility to quality and timely geographic information during emergency situations.