A new interesting article on volunteered “GIS systems, OpenStreetMap and all that stuff is out, whose long long title is “Crowdsourcing, citizen sensing and Sensor Web technologies for public and environmental health surveillance and crisis management: trends, OGC standards and application examples”. It is authored (among others) by Maged N. Kamel Boulos and its group at of Plymouth University, who is himself the editor-in-chief of the journal. Quoting from the abstract, it is an “in-depth review of the key issues and trends in these areas, the challenges faced when reasoning and making decisions with real-time crowdsourced data (such as issues of information overload, “noise”, misinformation, bias and trust), the core technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards involved (Sensor Web Enablement and Open GeoSMS), as well as a few outstanding project implementation examples from around the world.”
It is worth a read, most of all for non-experts in the field. But the publishing journal is as interesting as the paper: “International Journal of Health Geographics”: the idea of crossing geography and health research fields sounds quite intriguing. It is perfectly suited to disseminate the recent initiatives using GIS systems to deal with epidemics, natural disasters and healthcare campaigns. And it is good to know that it is an open access, peer review journal. It just casts a doubt to me: should a peer-reviewed journal publish articles authored by its editor?
