Mobile geotagged data gathering for disaster remediation

Devastating floods in Thailand during the final quarter of 2011 caused almost 600 deaths as well as severe damage to the country's infrastructure and economy. The crisis prompted us to very quickly develop a system using mobile devices to survey the status of industrial facilities in disaster-affected areas. Our objective was to create a system that would allow an untrained user equipped with a modern mobile telephone to acquire and transmit location-tagged information, in multiple modalities, about the conditions at a disaster site. The system needed to be robust in the face of abnormal conditions in the disaster area, should permit the users to use their own language, and should make the resulting data available immediately both to supervisors coordinating the disaster remediation effort and to experts elsewhere. In this paper we describe the motivation and methodology for this project, the functional architecture of the resulting software, its present status and its future prospects. The project serves a case study for rapid application development of geospatial software. The resulting application has potential utility in other disaster situations.