Monitoring Rural Water Points in Tanzania with Mobile Phones:The Evolution of the SEMA App

Development professionals have deployed several mobile phone-based ICT (Information and Communications Technology) platforms in the global South for improving water, health, and education services. In this paper, we focus on a mobile phone-based ICT platform for water services, called Sensors, Empowerment and Accountability in Tanzania (SEMA), developed by our team in the context of an action research project in Tanzania. Water users in villages and district water engineers in local governments may use it to monitor the functionality status of rural water points in the country. We describe the current architecture of the platform’s front-end (the SEMA app) and back-end and elaborate on its deployment in four districts in Tanzania. To conceptualize the evolution of the SEMA app, we use three concepts: transaction-intensiveness, discretion and crowdsourcing. The SEMA app effectively digitized only transaction-intensive tasks in the information flow between water users in villages and district water engineers. Further, it resolved two tensions over time: the tension over what to report (by decreasing the discretion of reporters) and over who should report (by constraining the reporting “crowd”)

Modeling aggregated expertise of user contributions to assess the credibility of OpenStreetMap features + Erratum

The emergence of volunteered geographic information (VGI) during the past decade has fueled a wide range of research and applications. The assessment of VGI quality and fitness-of-use is still a challenge because of the non-standardized and crowdsourced data collection process, as well as the unknown skill and motivation of the contributors. However, the frequent approach of assessing VGI quality against external data sources using ISO quality standard measures is problematic because of a frequent lack of available external (reference) data, and because for certain types of features, VGI might be more up-to-date than the reference data. Therefore, a VGI-intrinsic measure of quality is highly desirable. This study proposes such an intrinsic measure of quality by developing the concept of aggregated expertise based on the characteristics of a feature's contributors. The article further operationalizes this concept and examines its feasibility through a case study using OpenStreetMap (OSM). The comparison of model OSM feature quality with information from a field survey demonstrates the successful implementation of this novel approach

Space Education with The Living Textbook, A web-based tool using a Concept Browser

The ability to recognize the relationships between concepts is a crucial aspect of meaningful learning. Expert-generated concept maps have been shown to help students in forging connections by acting as scaffolds for cognitive processing. The Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente is developing a Living Textbook which combines an online knowledge repository with an interactive map visualizing the relationships between concepts. Our teachers and students have started to use this in the core modules at the start of our MSc programme. Tests show that this is a promising approach that drives us to further develop its procedures and applications

Using ILWIS Software for teaching Core Operations in Earth Observation

Computational methods in GIS and Earth Observation are an important part of the curricula in Geo - informatics. Apart from the theoretical foundations students need to get acquainted with the practical application of these methods in software. However, many GI software packages are not designed for the purpose of educating principles of GIS and Earth Observation and therefor do not provide the right tools and interfaces for students and novice users to comprehend the coreconcepts. In this paper we describe our effort to build a GI software that does support students in learning through visual workflows and linked views of different representations of raster images such as maps, tables and graphs