Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing, otherwise known as participatory mapping, has become a common and valuable tool for collecting detailed bottom-up data used to develop exposure data at a local scale as well as for validation of global scale geospatial information. It provides a rapid and low resource way to create fundamental data on infrastructure in an area and their associated physical, social and economic attributes. This approach, however, does have limits in both the type of data collected and the quality of that data. Communities and governments, who may not be trained technically in geography or disaster risk management, are largely the key players and the resulting outputs need to undergo significant curation before use for analysis. OpenStreetMap is one open data community that enables crowdsourcing parties to contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world.

Photo credit: Teaser image, OpenDRI; Banner image, UNDP / CC BY-SA 3.0

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