Content Merge from Crowd-Sourced Spatial Information
Dr. Bianca Schoen-­‐Phelan

Application Deadline: 11 January 2016
Application Documents: Academic CV, Cover letter, any other documents that the applicant considers relevant
Start Date: February 2016
Application Method: Email to [email protected]

Project Description

The recent decade has seen an unprecedented surge in available geo-referenced data. Social media providers, such as twitter (text) or flickr (images), have started to incorporate location into their feeds. This provides an opportunity to harness new sources of spatial information that are cheaper than traditional spatial data sources that typically require specialised hardware and expert users.

The biggest challenge for effective exploitation of these new spatial data sources lies in merging spatial information that references the same location but originate from different devices or different communication methods. This project aims to merge all layers of spatially referenced information into one spatial data model.

One application of such a system is the area of disaster management, where it would take heterogeneous sources and incorporate these in real time in an app for laypeople. We already see smart phones used in crisis situations, such as the current refugee crisis from Syria. Currently, app users read information manually from apps such as twitter and newspapers, and then manually process these individual pieces of information to make a route based decision. A system as envisioned by this project would immediately provide a content merge of all relevant information in order to assist decision making in critical situations.

Funding Notes

This project is funded under DIT fiosraigh scholarship funding for 4 years.

PhD Eligibility Criteria

Please see DIT’s graduate research office’s “Graduate Research Regulations” for further details.