Mapping Hurricane Sandy

I am sure it is not news to a lot of people that the path, destruction and emergency facilities for Hurricane Sandy have been mapped.  The BBC provides a map of damage and emergecny faclitites (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20154479). Likewise other news organisations provide similar information to readers, but these maps tend to be fairly static in providing a single set of inforamtion. Although you can zoom and change scale on the maps, they have a relatively low level of interactivity. These maps also rely on information being provided to the organisation from another source.

Integrating data sources and providing maps of informtion that is of use to a range of users is another, more difficult task. One of the key players in online mapping has been Google Interactive Maps ( http://google.org/crisismap/sandy-2012). The map for Hurriance Sandy is produced under the umbrella organsiation of Google Crisis Response (http://www.google.org/crisisresponse/) a Google project that collaborates with NGOs, government agencies and commerical organisations to provide information on things such as storm paths and emergency faciltities. Integrating these data sources to provide spaitally located information of use to responders, locals affected by the hazard, interested news readers and authorities involves a clear understanding of the requirements of each target audience and clear planning of the nature of information presentation for each of these. It is worth having a look at the interactive maps to assess for yourself whether this complex task has been achieved. In particular look at the type of information provided about particular resources, the nature of the resources mapped and the scale or level at which this information is displayed and to which part of the audience you beleive this information will be of use (why you think so is the next question).

It is also useful to compare this structured information with the less structured flow of information from Twitter (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/oct/31/twitter-sandy-flooding?INTCMP=SRCH). This analysis by Mark Graham, Adham Tamer, Ning Wang and Scott Hale looked at the use of the term 'flood' and 'flooding' in tweets in relation to Hurricane Sandy (see also blog at http://www.zerogeography.net/2012/10/data-shadows-of-hurricane.html. Although they were initially assessing if there was a difference in English language and Spanish language tweets about the storm, their analysis pointed out that tweets were not that useful at providing information aobut the storm at a spatial resolution of smaller than a county (although it isn't clear to me at least if they were mapping the location of the tweets or the contents of the tweets - in some cases the latter might provide some more detailed spatial information on flooding and its impact but would require extraction and interpretation from the tweet itself). This lower spatial resolution and the unfiltered, personal, subjective and unco-ordinated nature of this information source means that it is more difficult to quickly translate into information that is 'useable' by other audiences. Mark Graham is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/) and his webpage (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=165) and blog are definitely worth look for anyone interested in mapping and internet and mobile technologies.

 

UK Real-time Flood Alerts Online - Using Information in Novel Ways

A BBC report on 6th July (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18740402) informs its readers of the online launch of a real-time flood alerts map developed by Shoothill, a Shrewsbury-based company, which uses data from the Environment agency network of monitoring sites. Users can zoom into the map and see flood alerts and warning as issued by the Environment agency within the previous 15 minutes.


The site is worth a visit but it does beg the question, particularly as the unseasonably weather continue in Britain and elsewhere – what does this company add to the existing EA site that makes it more useful? The EA flood warning front page (http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/31618.aspx) shows a map of Britain that you can click on by region and then text information on flood warnings including locations are provided. Clicking further through the individual warning locations provides more detailed information. The Shoothill site provide the same information if you click on the symbol on the map.

The answer seems to be that the Shoothill site provides the information visually linked to a map. Is this such an advance? It seems to be and it indicates a key component of using the Web – the concept of mash-ups. Amazon and Google use a similar view of the flexibility of information in their Associates programmes – increasing revenues by allowing specialist to access databases and the facilities to purchase goods through links to Amazon and Google sites.

For Shoothill, the data is provided by the EA but the use to which it is put, and the value added to that novel use, is provided by Shoothill. Locating the flood warnings in a map may seem obvious but it takes specialist skills and time to do this, particularly in beign able to update the inforamtion in real-time. Shoothill uses the existing information in an innovative way adding value to the data in terms of how people can use and interpret it. Such innovation would not be possible without access to that information. This may seem like an odd view of data and information but within the Web environment, the value of information does not necessarily lie in keeping it the private and the exclusive property of one company or organization. The value of information can be released or expanded by allowing others to access it and to use it in a manner that may not have been envisaged by the information generators. Both parties can gain as Amazon and Goggle have already figured out!