CrowdSA - Crowdsourced Situation Awareness for Crisis Management

With the enormous rise of social media and ubiquitous mobile access, crowdsourcing applications, where the “wisdom of the crowd” helps solving problems, became more and more popular. The tremendous potential of crowdsourcing has been also recognized for emergency and crisis situations by employing "citizens as sensors", being intrinsically motivated and authentic source for providing valuable situational information not available elsewhere due to damaged or simply non-available infrastructures. This information about unexpected or unusual incidents, damages, mutual aid initiatives or even cries for help can considerably enhance situation awareness responsible authorities and citizens. So far, crowdsourcing has been mainly used for simple collection and dissemination of crisis information without providing smart processing facilities to incorporate crowdsourced information into existing situational pictures. Goal of the project is to leverage situation awareness in crisis management by enriching situational crisis pictures assessed on basis of conventional information sources with intelligently sensed crowdsourced information in a traceable manner. This will enhance the preparedness of responsible authorities and citizens to allow for more accurate decisions in crisis situations and to actively issue requests for certain missing situational information to a potentially closed group of citizens. crowdSA pursues the following three research goals. First, crowdSA aims at intelligent sensing of crowdsources by providing appropriate sensor adapters and tuning mechanisms as well as knowledge-based extraction of crowdsourced content. Second, crowdSA focuses on adequate enrichment of situational pictures by proper quality analysis as well as fusion and injection of crisis information. Third, crowdSA targets comprehensive traceability of situational enrichments by providing adequate means for obliviously generating, storing and visualizing provenance information.