The last couple of days, the picturesque city of Albi in southern France became the gathering place of researchers, practitioners and organizations in the field of information systems for crisis response and management. Following the ISCRAM conference theme “Agility is coming” presentations, round tables, workshops, symposiums and keynotes were organized in which the current and previous work and challenges, developments and objectives were shared and discussed by professionals from over 20 countries of the world. How can we facilitate efficient collaboration between researchers and practitioners? How to use new technology and methodologies to improve preparedness, mitigation as well as disaster and crisis response?
For GIScience, Carolin Klonner presented her current study on the use of country-specific training materials for remote mapping activations. The paper introduces current practices for the work with volunteer mappers to support disaster management and data quality assurance.
A literature review of quality assessment methods for Crowdsourced Geographic Information was presented by Livia Castro Degrossi (AGORA, University of São Paulo, Brazil/ GIScience), showing the current state of the art and focusing on intrinsic data quality assessments.
The first day of ISCRAM is traditionally dedicated to workshops and tutorials. One of these workshop topics being the “Post-Crisis Damage and Needs Assessment of Buildings for Response, Reconstruction and Recovery Planning”, Melanie Eckle (HeiGIT) used this chance to introduce our NSF Eager project around area based damage assessments and comparative damage rankings by volunteers.
Moreover, Melanie presented the initial approach in the CrowdFDA project, regarding the use of VGI to monitor post-disaster recovery in tourist destinations.
All papers can be accessed in the ISCRAM proceedings.
We thank the organizing team, the “yellow barrets”, for a great conference, amazing venues and for keeping their promise “AlbiThere4U”. A big thank you furthermore to the members of the ISCRAM community, for inspiring and innovative talks and discussions, project ideas and follow-ups. We are very looking forward to extending our collaborations. In this sense: Merci beaucoup et à bientôt!
Degrossi, L.C.; Albuquerque, J.P.d.; Rocha, R.d.S; Zipf, A. (2017): A Framework of Quality Assessment Methods for Crowdsourced Geographic Information: a Systematic Literature Review. ISCRAM 2017. 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management. Albi, France.
Eckle, M.; Herfort, B.; Yan, Y.; Kuo, C-L.; Zipf, A. (2017): Towards using Volunteered Geographic Information to monitor post-disaster recovery in tourist destinations. ISCRAM 2017. 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management. Albi, France.
Klonner, C., Eckle, M., Usón, T. & Höfle, B. (2017): Quality Improvement of Remotely Volunteered Geographic Information via Country-Specific Mapping Instructions. ISCRAM 2017. 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management. Albi, France.