Disaster management and emergency services can benefit greatly from Crowdsource Mapping, according to an article in the UN-SPIDER Newsletter. The idea is to collect data from as many on-site sources as possible and translate that real-time data into maps. Being aware of the surrounding and the infrastructure, locals can render accurate geo-referenced information or comment on existing data and thereby help disaster managers expand the information they need for emergency operations. That is of course not only true for on-going disasters, but also for risk assessment and preparedness efforts.
Crowdsource mapping UN-SPIDER Newsletter
So we’ve been spending quite some time with the very cool editing capabilities of the ArcGIS FeatureLayer. We are most interested in services published to ArcGIS Online. Editing will be a key advantage mobile brings to the world of ArcGIS. Avoiding the details (maybe in a future post), but not all ArcGIS FeatureLayers are the same. We wanted to put together a demo of the editing of a Featurelayer which contains a featureCollection, from the ESRI docs:
“The featureCollection is used when you want to initialize the FeatureLayer with features from outside of ArcGIS Server.”
This lends itself well to offline editing.
ArcGIS Mobile Editing
In the demo below we are online and accessing the app via a mobile browser (note, this demo needs Flash and thus wont run on an iOS device):
