In order to promote students and young scientists’ activities, AARS (Asian Association on Remote Sensing) has been organizing a web contest since the ACRS2011 in Taipei. Now in its 5th year, the WEBCON5 at ACRS2015 was held in Manila last October 20, 2015.
Two RAs, Leonor Ycaza and Raymond Ong took this opportunity to showcase their own mobile application creations which were developed as a way to help in the advancement of the PHIL – LiDAR 1 goals in attribution and disaster mitigation.
Ms. Ycaza presented her mobile application CRAZE which stood for Community Reporting of Aggregate Zamboanga City Emergencies. It is a mobile-based application that hinges on community involvement, collaboration and hopes to ultimately empower individuals especially in times of emergencies. What it does is basically to provide a platform for online participation and discussion where people can actively share observations of real-time events. An observation can range from any emergency that may occur within a community; this may range from mildly alarming such as blackouts and water shortages to high level distressing events such as crimes, vehicular accidents, fires, flooding, and explosions.
Mr. Ong presented his application GEONYT or GEO mapping Not Your Type. This application proposes the creation of a database for easily accessible offline maps based on a GPS/GIS integrated system of geo tagging at – risk areas. The proposed application will provide a database system which can help pinpoint the exact areas which are at risk of flooding. This system will also be available for offline access, which is useful for areas which can suffer from internet connection interruption whenever a flooding event occurs. The accessibility of the system from several Android devices can be a great help for agencies which conduct search and rescue in times of flooding events.
The ultimate aim of the creation of this system is to raise awareness about the risk – level of the areas which are prone to flooding; this serves as crucial information for government and personal decision-making in times of a flooding event.
As endorsed by the ACRS, “The objective of this [WEBCON] contest is to promote the development of web materials which may give us a future vision of the web related to geo-information sciences. Any students and young scientists who are younger than 35 and have registered to the Asian Conference on Remote Sensing(ACRS) can nominate their web materials to WEBCON.“
