Abstract
Abstract. Remote sensing is increasingly used to assess disaster damage, traditionally by professional image analysts. A recent alternative is crowdsourcing by volunteers experienced in remote sensing, using internet-based mapping portals. We identify a range of problems in current approaches, including how volunteers can best be instructed for the task, ensuring that instructions are accurately understood and translate into valid results, or how the mapping scheme must be adapted for different map user needs. The volunteers, the mapping organizers, and the map users all perform complex cognitive tasks, yet little is known about the actual information needs of the users. We also identify problematic assumptions about the capabilities of the volunteers, principally related to the ability to perform the mapping, and to understand mapping instructions unambiguously. We propose that any robust scheme for collaborative damage mapping must rely on Cognitive Systems Engineering and its principal method, Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA), to understand the information and decision requirements of the map and image users, and how the volunteers can be optimally instructed and their mapping contributions merged into suitable map products. We recommend an iterative approach involving map users, remote sensing specialists, cognitive systems engineers and instructional designers, as well as experimental psychologists.
Highlights
Recent disasters, such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, have been met by rapid response assistance on part of the international community, both government and private sector
Commercial satellite data have become indispensable in rapid postdisaster structural damage assessment (Zhang and Kerle, 2008)
Until a few years ago access was virtually always restricted, even in the context of international disaster response. This has been changing in recent years, coinciding with increasingly routine post-disaster assistance based on remote sensing data, facilitated through the International Charter “Space and Major Disasters” (Ito, 2005; Stryker and Jones, 2009)
Summary
Recent disasters, such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, have been met by rapid response assistance on part of the international community, both government and private sector. In the context of Charter activations, ever growing numbers of satellite images are being acquired and damage maps generated for major disasters. This has led to increasing visibility of such support, as well as an expanding user base for the resulting maps. Hoffman: Collaborative damage mapping for emergency response were made to apply collaborative mapping, a form of crowdsourcing (Goodchild and Glennon, 2010), in post-disaster situations This has taken two principal forms: (i) mapping by a number of experts that share the burden of analyzing large data sets in a coordinated manner, and (ii) mapping efforts by thousands of largely laypersons in openly accessible mapping portals.
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