Crowdsourcing integrated with crisis maps has been a powerful tool in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Future crowdsourcing applications must provide capabilities to better manage unstructured messages and enhance streaming data. Enhancements will also include methods of fusing information with data from other sources, such as geological data about fault lines and reports of various earthquake aftershocks. Researchers are just beginning to consider trust management systems to help evaluate messages with respect to the huge troves of messages being traded in cyberspace and via cell phones.

Huiji Gao and Geoffrey Barbier, Arizona State University

Rebecca Goolsby, US Office of Naval Research

Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief
http://star-tides.net/sites/default/files/documents/files/Harnessing-the-Crowdsourcins-Power-of-Social-Media-for-Disaster-Relief.pdf