CrisisNET Speedily Aggregates Social Data In Disaster Situations

Not-for-profit software company Ushahidi has launched CrisNET, an open-source platform that it claims will dramatically reduce the amount of time that it takes journalists, analysts and humanitarian organisations to get their hands on well-structured, crowdsourced data in the midst of conflict and disaster.

Ushahidi describes CrisisNET as a "the firehose of global crisis data". It has been designed to suck in data from a number of sources, then consolidate the data into a useful format to help people effectively monitor a crisis situation. The organisation has a track record of helping to gather data from social media during natural disasters and political revolutions -- it was formed in the aftermath of the disputed 2007 Kenyan presidential election -- but the sheer quantity that it now pulls in is expensive to clean and format at speed.