An Experimental Evaluation of a Crowdsourcing-Based Approach for Flood Risk Management

Abstract

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a potential source of information to complement other sources in flood risk management. However, there is still not enough experimental evidence about the usefulness of VGI in different situations and scenarios. We conducted an experimental evaluation for verifying if VGI, obtained through a crowdsourcing platform, can be useful for the flood risk management context. The experiment occurred in two points of the watershed of Sao Carlos/ SP in Brazil with 15 participants. The results show that volunteered geographic information is, in average, comparable to sensor data. Thus, we can conclude that using crowdsourcing for producing VGI can be a useful source for flood risk management