Within the "Evolution of Copernicus Services” research broader theme, E2mC focuses on the “Operationability of crowd sourcing for the EMS”
The project aims at demonstrating the technical and operational feasibility of the integration of social media analysis and crowdsourcing within the full Copernicus EMS (Mapping and Early Warning) and at developing:
a) a prototype of the innovative Copernicus Witness, a new EMS Service Component conceived to exploit social media analysis and crowdsourcing capabilities oriented to improved information management for emergency responders and b) a prototype of the Social Crisis Map, a new Product type of the EMS Portfolio.
The E2mC innovative technological bulk is a Social&Crowd Platform aimed at improving the geo-information for Civil Protection, on a 24/7 basis, by increasing its quantity (additional data), its quality (live maps combined with social multimedia contents) and its timeliness (first crisis map available within few hours). This will result in early confirmation of alerts from Early Warning Systems and in first rapid impact assessment from the field.
In line with well established Copernicus principles, the design, development and demonstration of the innovative Copernicus Witness will be user driven, where in this case users are not only beneficiaries of products but they also actively contribute to content generation as witnesses (citizens as “sensors”) and as part of a “crowd” (Web 2.0 collaboration).
The overall objective of E2mC are:
1. Design and develop a prototype of the innovative and scalable S&C Platform, able to analyse heterogeneous social media data streams (different data: text, image, video from different sources: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), to federate heterogeneous and distributed crowdsourcing platforms (crisis and emergency specific platforms: Tomnod, HOT, SBTF, GeoTag-X, UN Asign, etc. generic platforms: Crowdcrafting, Epicollect), to provide the new Social Crisis Map and to build a fully EC/Copernicus EMS branded crowdsourcing and citizen reporting platform, designed taking into account the strategic and operational needs and logics of emergency responders.
2. Demonstrate the operational usefulness of the Copernicus Witness, the new Copernicus EMS Component based on the functionalities developed within the S&C Platform, acting as a reference tool for Civil Protection Authorities and Humanitarian Aid operators to collect trustable information from their networks of volunteers and associations; the Component will include a section that will be openly accessible to any Citizen with “moderated” contents.
3. Demonstrate the tangible benefits of the S&C platform to the Copernicus EMS within realistic and operational scenarios jointly designed with the Copernicus EMS providers and a selection of Copernicus EMS expert users and potential new users to evaluate tangible benefits to the Copernicus EMS in terms of enhanced service performances (quality, timeliness and production capacity). Fully integrated in the Copernicus EMS legacy architecture it will optimize the available information for emergency responders and ultimately contribute to improved emergency management.
4. Assess the quality and credibility of the information generated through the analysis of social media data or gathered through crowdsourcing mechanisms, assess if and under which conditions such information can be trusted by Civil Protections and Humanitarian Aid operators in their decision making process and develop actionable technical and procedural measures to increase the level of trust associated to such information flows.
5. Define a roadmap for the full uptake of the Copernicus Witness within the Copernicus EMS, taking into account the knowledge and experience gathered in the demonstration phase as well as deeply analysing the governance aspects related to the operations and exploitation of the Copernicus Witness both in the Copernicus EMS context and in the broader panorama of crisis/emergency management initiatives.
