Photos taken in disaster situations and other humanitarian crises by different people on the ground can potentially be a powerful resource for the response teams. In fact, the information we gain from these images can be crucial to provide humanitarian aid not only in the immediate response effort, but also in future recovery and preparedness work.
Unfortunately, the manpower needed to process the incredible number of photos coming out of these situations makes this duty impossible for a single organization. Therefore we are turning to the crowd and looking for volunteers to help us rapidly extract meaningful, relevant and structured data from these photos.
This is why we launched the GeoTag-X platform, which gathers a series of pilot projects (for example, the Emergency Shelter Assessment project) covering different disaster related events. GeoTag-X asks people to analyse the photographs associated with each event by answering some short and strictly structured questions.
Our final aim is to have an open source tool and associated analysis questions that can be taken by anyone working in an humanitarian crisis and quickly and easily adapted to their needs. To do so, we need as many volunteers as possible to help us assess GeoTag-X’s suitability as a tool in disaster response.