The Gulf oil spill with oil oozing up on Gulf beaches is nothing short of a disaster, but now there is an iPhone, Android an' Droid app that can help collecting data and oil.
The Oil Reporter app users check-in in their app to report what they're seeing on the ground. Users
can upload photos and videos, reporting oil sighting, harmed wildlife
sightings and much more. Download the app for iPhone or Android and
start helping out today.
Phone and Android smartphone users who download Oil Reporter will be asked a series of questions about their eyewitness
account, Users can geo-tag time/date stamp photos for accurate
reporting, and they can tweet their data.
Data from these mobile applications will be stored by
San Diego State University
and provided back to the public via
Oil Reporter's open API.
Oil Reporter's Adopt-A-Beach initiative will provide the
opportunity for
virtual volunteers to review high resolutions imagery of the Gulf Coast
and to map data elements such as perimeters of oil presence and injured
wildlife in remote areas where physical assessment access is limited.
This also provides an opportunity for Oil Reporter photographs and video
to be joined with high resolution imagery to provide greater
understanding and provide an ability to share data from these sources
back to the public.
Government agencies that want to use Oil Reporter for gathering
and
reporting agency-specific data can also do so. Agencies log
into
Oil Reporter and enter their organization ID to ensure their data
is
filtered and captured separately on the back-end.
Crowdsourced data collected from the Oil Reporter app will be
shared in
open and accessible data feeds freely available to response
organizations, academic institutions, such as San Diego State
University's Visualization Center, and others via www.oilreporter.org.
Oil Reporter for iPhone and Android has been released as open source on
GitHub. If you're a developer and would like to contribute then please
join the social
coding!