Last week Carolin Klonner, Melanie Eckle and Benjamin Herfort attended the 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management in Rio de Janeiro.
The ISCRAM community is globally active and brings together researchers, academics, practitioners as well as policy makers to promote research and development of information systems for crisis management. This year’s conference had a special focus on resilience.
Carolin gave a talk about the application of OpenStreetMap Field Papers for urban flood risk awareness assessment. The approach, which was developed within the NEOHAZ project, can be applied not only by GIS-professionals but also by local communities or authorities. The impact of this study, which integrates local knowledge captured via an open source tool, was honoured by the conference audience and organizing commitee with the “Best Student Paper” award.
Klonner, C., Marx, S., Usón, T. & Höfle, B. (2016): Risk Awareness Maps of Urban Flooding via OSM Field Papers- Case Study Santiago de Chile. 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. ISCRAM 2016. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Melanie presented the OpenFloodRiskMap project including a video demonstration showing the core functionalities. The OpenFloodRiskMap is an online tool for decision support that combines a disaster related object type catalogue with dedicated OSM services like overpass API and the OpenRouteService. The application provides an example how volunteered geographic information from OpenStreetMap and existing technology can be integrated with special regards to emergency planning purposes.
Eckle, M., Herfort, B., Albuquerque, R. Leiner, R. Wolff, C. Jacobs, J. P., Zipf, A. (2016): Leveraging OpenStreetMap to support flood risk management: A prototype decision support system for the identification of critical infrastructure. 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. ISCRAM 2016. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Benjamin showed an analysis of OpenStreetMap data regarding shelter sites after the Nepal Earthquake 2015. This research gives insight in the quality of OSM data and further presents an approach to validate and update dynamic features in OpenStreetMap. This paper was nominated for the “Best Student Paper” award. Furthermore, Benjamin presented a typology of crowdsourcing geographic information, which was applied to the Missing Maps project.
Herfort, B., Eckle, M., de Albuquerque, J. P., (2016): Being specific about geographic information crowdsourcing: a typology and analysis of the Missing Maps project in South Kivu. 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. ISCRAM 2016. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Anhorn, J., Herfort, B., Albuquerque, J. P., (2016): Crowdsourced Validation and Updating of Dynamic OSM Features: A Nepal Earthquake Case Study. 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. ISCRAM 2016. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
We would like to thank the organizers for this interesting conference and all attendees for the great discussions. We are looking forward to next year’s conference in France.