Crowdsourcing Aerial Image Mapping with MapMill.org and Cartagen Knitter

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Jeffrey Warren, Public Laboratory
Adam Griffith, Public Laboratory

Increased participation in neogeographical aerial image mapping techniques such as kite, balloon and other unmanned aerial systems has shown the need for open source tools to work with the data. The imagery acquisition field techniques introduce remote sensing to a host of new users that are able to interact with data in ways previously made impossible by cost, education, and ease of acquisition of imagery. Mapmill.org and Cartagen Knitter are presented as crowdsourcing tools for sorting through raw flight data and rectifying the imagery. Participation in the sorting is easier than image rectification, thus separation of the tools.

Mapmill.org works towards sorting and organizing raw flight data in a simple web application. Imagery is interactively displayable in different fields and users sort through raw data by assigning values to separate images that are accumulated.

Cartagen.org Knitter works to rectify aerial imagery by warping the data dynamically in overlay with base orthoimagery data in a web application. The resultant map is viewable at Cartagen.org and GIS exportable. These tools work together towards participatory mapping at the community level.

Speaker Bio: 

The creator of GrassrootsMapping.org, Jeff Warren designs mapping tools, visual programming environments, and flies kites as a fellow in MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, and as a student at the MIT Media Lab‚Äôs Design Ecology group, where he created the vector-mapping framework Cartagen. He co-founded Vestal Design, a graphic/interaction design firm in 2004, and directed the Cut&Paste Labs project, a year-long series of workshops on opensource tools and Web design in 2006-7 with Lima designer Diego Rotalde. 

Schedule info

Time slot: 
Thu, 09/15/2011 - 10:30am - 11:00am
Room: 
Tower Court C