As some of you might have known, we are running an experiment with CollabMap (www.collabmap.org), a crowdsourcing application for mapping evacuation routes, for the residential areas around the Fawley Oil Refinery near Southampton. The main aim of the exercise is to get a detailed evacuation map for the area, which has not been previously available, and run simulations to trial large-scale evacuation plans in case of disaster.
There are less than three more days to go, when we run a lottery to reward our contributors, and significant progress has been made in terms of the amount of work and its quality. In total, more than 27,000 tasks were completed by more than 100 contributors. Evacuation routes have been mapped for more than 600 buildings, and many more are still in the pipeline to be verified.
The current map of buildings identified by CollabMap contributors (see the live map)
In addition to the evacuation route data being collected, we are also keeping track of the full provenance of those data, recording who responsible for what along with timing information, which we plan to use for studying the behaviours of our contributors.
Part of a big provenance graph recorded for one building
We are hoping that when the experiment finishes, we will have good data sets to explore various research questions in the areas of disaster response, provenance, and crowdsourcing. We are willing to provide access to them inside Orchid if there is interest. Any idea about how to best use the data sets is very welcome, as well as any questions about CollabMap.
Finally, if you have a few minutes, please share the link of CollabMap to your social networks (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter links are on CollabMap’s front page). As the finishing line is close, we need a final push to get as much data as we could. There are 9 lottery prizes of value up to £300 to be won (Orchid members are not eligible, sorry), and only 10 simple tasks need to be completed for a lottery ticket.