The API can be used to retrieve report data from a Smap server. This version is out of draft however it will evolve with feedback from the Speed Evidence project team and the Ushahidi developers who are creating a Portal that will consume the API. Hopefully it should be fully implemented in Smap releases from the 1st of August.
The API will allow the proposed Speed Evidence Portal to present survey data alongside relevant community information submitted using SMS messages.
CSIRO have been developing software for monitoring social media. Last monday I went to Canberra to talk to Ron Jones who is responsible for business development of these products. We met, near his office on the ANU campus, at the Purple Pickle cafe.
We discussed two products but I am going to focus on the Emergency Situation Awareness application (ESA) for this blog post since its very relevant to the work that Smap Consulting does. The title of this post is a quote from a video produced by CSIRO showing how ESA works.
My understanding is that ESA analyses the frequency of occurrence of key words or hashtags in tweets over a period of several months. Then if there is a deviation from the background level of a word during a 2 minute window an alert will be created at one of 4 levels depending on the amount of deviation; green-blue-purple-red. Here is a screen shot from the video showing alerts for the word storm around about the time a tropical storm hit Brisbane.
The second column is the date and time that the alerts began, the third column the duration that an elevated alert level was maintained and the 4th column the number of alerts during that period. ESA has an API that allows an external system to interrogate the statistical server.
This would be a great tool to integrate with Smap and Ushahidi to get a better picture of the situation after a rapid onset emergency. ESA could be used to identify new events while Smap can be used to provide an assessment of that event. The results can then be shown on a tool such as the Speed portal, further filtering the “firehose” of information that emergency workers can be subjected to.
Getting this tool applied to rapid onset emergencies in developing countries would require a little bit of effort and cash. For example currently only tweets in Australia are monitored. Possibly we would need a server for Africa or Asia etc. However it looks very promising to me.
I have been working on a project to allow reports from Smap to be added to a portal that provides an assessment of the situation in the first 72 hours after a rapid onset emergency. This is for World Vision’s Speed Evidence project, Ushahidi are writing the portal.
These new reports support oembed so they can be inserted into a wordpress blog such as this one. Here is a report containing a map.
https://dev.smap.com.au/surveyKPI/reports/view/55b17e69-e303-4993-94af-679ac21187e7
The above report is a map from the Smap analysis dashboard showing:
Here is another report containing a graph showing the problems reported grouped by the gender of the person reporting the problem.
https://dev.smap.com.au/surveyKPI/reports/view/b4a5a777-da5b-4227-ba36-bcb2dec14c5a
Finally here is a report containing a table.
https://dev.smap.com.au/surveyKPI/reports/view/d6b4f980-ca9e-4ac3-8728-01dcd1587962
This table shows the average age of the people who reported each problem.
This capability is still beta and will be released in 2-3 weeks. Some of the work that still needs to happen includes: