Crowdsourcing Linked Open Data for Disaster Management

Ortmann Jens, Limbu Minu, Wang Dong, Kauppinen Tomi

Abstract

This paper shows how Linked Open Data can ease the chal- lenges of information triage in disaster response efforts. Recently, disaster management has seen a revolution in data collection. Local victims as well as people all over the world collect observations and make them available on the web. Yet, this crucial and timely information source comes unstructured. This hinders a processing and integration, and of- ten a general consideration of this information. Linked Open Data is supported by number of freely available technologies, backed up by a large community in academia and it offers the opportunity to create flexible mash-up solutions. At hand of the Ushahidi Haiti platform, this paper suggests crowdsourced Linked Open Data. We take a look at the requirements, the tools that are there to meet these requirements, and suggest an architecture to enable non-experts to contribute Linked Open Data.