International Snow Science Workshop Grenoble Chamonix Mont-Blanc - 2013

GeoAvalanche: State of Art and future developments

1

Francesco Bartoli1,*
Geobeyond Srl, Rome, Italy

ABSTRACT: Modern crisis management and emergency tools reveal how the geolocation of
information is pervaded by crowdsourcing. Such mechanism is the key element behind the spirit
of GeoAvalanche for improving the awareness of avalanche risk at a more fine-grained spatial
resolution. The initial experiment has grown to a mature ICT platform able to accomplish the most
needs of avalanche warning services by gathering observations from mobile clients and notification
mechanisms
for
the
public.
Open
data model,
customizable open
source apps,
geographical standards are the challenges we have supported so far for easily sharing avalanche
data.
We have built a more responsive website along with mobile usability which now supports an api
interface to be smoothly integrated with your existing applications. Professional groups and
any mountaineer are now capable to report near real-time snow avalanche information from their
smartphones even when they are in connectionless mountain areas through the use of the
GeoAvalanche apps equipped with deferred Internet and GeoSMS-based communications ready-togo.
KEYWORDS: snow, avalanche, sdi, wms, wfs, crowdsourcing.

INTRODUCTION

Crowdsourcing and web mapping are

becoming increasingly more common in society
as well as disaster management. Crowdsourcing
has shown its strengths in endeavours such as
Wikipedia. The combining of crowdsourcing and
web mapping has already produced great
results with OpenStreetMap. The field of crisis
management has also benefited from this
combination when it was successfully used in
disaster
relief
operations
like
during
earthquakes.
Volunteered
Geographic
Information (VGI) is a new form of technology
where citizens act as sensors. The "crowd'' is
able to collect, store and share information
about events and points of interest in the areas
of crisis or inconveniences. The community of
snow avalanche can identify incidents,
avalanche locations, people in need of
immediate help, severe weather, snow
conditions, measurements of fresh snow, etc.
Rescuers and forecasters can use this
information to quickly get an overview,
supplement their analysis and plan their
operations around that information.
Obtaining timely up-to-date information from
the mountain is challenging due to many factors:
the extent of the mountainous areas, lack of
many specialists to patrolling all the areas on
the ground, etc. Citizens and professional
groups can greatly support collection of ground
information if they are provided with appropriate
tools.
______________________
Corresponding author address: Francesco Bartoli,
Geobeyond Srl, Rome, Italy;
tel: +39 333 299 7173; fax: +39 074 667 6843;
email: francesco.bartoli@geobeyond.it

Crowdsourced snow avalanche data can be

collected at a tremendous pace and kept fresh
due to the "many eyes watching'' principle. A
series of existing channels can be already used
to monitor how the situation evolves in the
mountains. Information is shared easily through
social mapping tools, but also through blogs,
Twitter, Facebook, etc. while geographical
information can be distributed through
geospatial platforms and other OGC products
which enable spatial data infrastructures.
2

GEOAVALANCHE

GeoAvalanche combines a social mapping

tool for capturing real-time crowdsourced snow
avalanche information in a spatially-aware
manner with a geodata fusion server capable to
assimilate disparate sources and to process
terrestrial monitoring and Earth Observation all
together.
Mountaineers,
professionals,
practitioners worldwide can be the first
responders from the terrain who collect, sort and
reliably report new fresh informations of what
potentially could affect the avalanche danger
locally and consequently help warning services
toward a fine-grained avalanche bulletin. The
responsiveness of groups of professional users
(mountain guides, rescuers, etc) who daily visit
almost inaccessible places will support
nowcasting and short-term prevision in a
meaningful manner with the intent of putting
critical conditions of the reported locations at
disposal to the public and for the avalanche
centers. The crowdmap of GeoAvalanche is able

International Snow Science Workshop Grenoble Chamonix Mont-Blanc - 2013

to collect geo-localized reports for different
categories: avalanche incidents, fresh snow
measures, snowdrifts, altitude of release areas,
kind
of
precipitations,
wind
direction,
spontaneous avalanche pictures. The quality,
reliability and correctness of data can be
guaranteed through the building a large
community, which sets out to surveil the data by
performing cross-checks, reclaiming false
entries and assessing the credibility of users
and data sources. Out-of-the-box, the platform
has the capability to deal with all these features
by leveraging some degree of trustworthiness
that can be created and maintained through few
approval workflows before content appear in the
maps. The overall relevant avalanche data can
be processed and further ingested into models
for advanced forecasting and promptly releasing
updates to the public.
The GeoAvalanche services offer a powerful
way to expose these aggregated data over the
Internet and to consume such semantically
evolved datasets through the use of geospatial
services (WMS, WFS, WCS, WPS) from OGC,
which permit to act as a common free access
point to a snow avalanche spatial data
infrastructure (SDI).

Figure 1. GeoAvalanche service pattern

The data fusion model behind the server
enables several functionalities, which exploit the
OGC standards and allow interacting with
different clients according to a service oriented
architecture paradigm.
3

THE PRESENT

At the moment the project consists of two

separate servers published on the Internet at the
following sites:

http://geoavalanche.org - Geoportal of
geographical services dedicated to snow and
avalanches
http://geoavalanche.org/incident/ - Portal of
crowdsourced snow avalanche data
Both sites are recipients of open data: in the
first users are able to upload data in a variety of
formats and create their own free maps by
starting from existing mashups and data shared
from others; data are collected all together and
reside under searchable categories with
information regarding the owner, the license and
who has produced them.

Figure 2. An example of a snow precipitation

layer that can be used to create own risk maps
Anonymous users can have free access to
public area where maps and layers reside,
search them with full-text queries, share results
with their social media accounts while some
functionalities are available under a registered
profile. The latter features allow to expressing
ratings to layers and maps, creating new
visualizations
with
multiple
overlays,
downloading and exporting maps to sites, blogs,
third-party applications and mobile apps.
Registered users can be assigned to
different roles in a manner to grant the access to
specific data sources, services, and applications
hence to limit the service pattern offered by the
platform on a profile basis. This is particular of
interest for organizations like avalanche centers,
which want to give out public access just for
certain products: interactive avalanche bulletin
maps, severe snowfalls, etc while the whole
service pattern still continues to be at disposal
for internal uses.
The core of this geoportal leverages on the
power of an extended GeoServer (Open Source
geospatial engine) for handling with snow and
avalanche information from spatial databases; it
supports the exchange of CAAML data to
achieve interoperability at all level of the public
safety's value-chain. This means the same
recipe could be deployed elsewhere without the
need necessarily to be a public website but
offering the same sort of scope by connecting
through a network of GeoAvalanche servers.

International Snow Science Workshop Grenoble Chamonix Mont-Blanc - 2013

The other face of the project is a portal of
crowdsourced information for reporting data
about snow and avalanches. This site is based
on a social mapping platform in which the user
plays a key role that becomes a sign of
testimony in the community assuming the
appearance of daily sentinel of the dangers
related to avalanches in the mountains.
Even this portal offers a public area with a
lot of basic features:
- an interactive map where people can filter
out points, which are referring to the locations
reported and clustered on proximity basis, by
categories and sub-categories:
- Fresh snow
- Spontaneous avalanches
- Snow conditions
- Avalanche incidents, with subentries
referring to the avalanche danger classes:
- VERY HIGH
- HIGH
- CONSIDERABLE
- MODERATE
- LOW
- the capability to navigate each single
clustered dot of the map up to the list of the
reports number contained inside
- the possibility to execute full-text search
and upon that add more structured filters
- a base layer map from OpenStreetMap
thought specifically for outdoors that provides
principal peaks, elevation profiles, mountain
routes, huts, etc
- a slider to execute temporal filters directly
in the map
- submission forms for filling out the new
reports by the website specifically for the
categories of interest.
The users once landed in the reports page
can view them by a list or by map and add
complex filters based on the attributes of each
single category. This represents an invaluable
addition for extracting statistical information from
a huge database designated to grow during the
years.

The reports can also be collected directly

from mobile devices such as modern
smartphones where an app for iOS and Android
platforms is already available. The app uses
GPS tracking devices, recording the location of
each witness along with all other information
entered by the user. In case of data connection
availability then the information are transmitted
in real time to the server otherwise they are sent
through a special SMS (Open GeoSMS), which
can encode the coordinates or, alternatively,
these remain stored for being sent later when
the connection is recovered by the phone.
Messages can be sent by a registered user
on the platform or even in a totally anonymous
manner. Once received these are handled by an
approval mechanism, which is driven by the
reliability of the user profile in the community or
by the proven trustiness of the testimony given
before being made available to the public into
the map. In the case of members privileged by
official roles such as forecasters, patrollers,
mountain guides then the information can
automatically be judged true and made visible in
the portal. Not to mention that people can
register, even without being registered, to a
notification service for all verified reports that fall
in certain areas by identifying points of interest
and ranges of proximity. At approval of new
reports, the system generates alerts whom then
dispatches by email to those who have
subscribed to the service.

Figure 4. Excerpt of reports gathered from

December 2012 up to May 2013

Figure 3. Crowdmap of all the incidents in

avalanche filtered by danger at level
CONSIDERABLE.

The past winter the GeoAvalanche portal

received more than 2000 visits by people from
about 50 countries interested in open data
relating to snow and avalanches. A total of 168
reports have been approved in the system from
the last December to May.
The information collected in GeoAvalanche
are in fact issued with a Creative Commons
license (CC-NC-BY3.0) that legitimizes the use
and reuse for educational purposes as long as it
is kept the same type of ownership on the data
treated. The platform provides a RESTful API

International Snow Science Workshop Grenoble Chamonix Mont-Blanc - 2013

interface for blogs, portals and third-party
applications that allows to recover the entire
dataset or parts of it through lightweight web
formats such as JSON, also well suitable to
mobile devices. This feature becomes the
driving force for the sharing of open data, the
advanced visualization and the processing into
algorithms like those used by forecasters as well
as specialized containers like the same data
fusion server of GeoAvalanche.
4

THE FUTURE

Both portals are made using only open

source software, which is continuously improved
by adding new features or resolving any bugs. In
the near future the two portals will acquire a
unique identity in a transparent manner for the
user. In fact, a number of additional features are
in the works to allow a more and more huge
convergence of the two containers described
towards a fully integrated solution.
First of all there will be a centralized
management of users, their profiles and login
credentials. In this way they will not have to
register themselves on two different sites and
the usability of the platform could acquire
undoubtly many advantages even in the face of
the adoption of a common graphic template for
all the whole integrated platform.
In addition, GeoAvalanche will try to give
always a larger boost to the adoption of the
mobile apps, on which it will add the ability to
receive notifications even either by near realtime pushing or by sending SMS from the
platform in order to involve all end users who
frequent the mountain more and more in a
virtuous social circle that increases the safety.
5

REFERENCES

Bartoli, F., GeoAvalanche - spatial data infrastructure

for avalanche awareness warning, Geobeyond
Srl, Proceedings, 2012 International Snow
Science Workshop, Anchorage, Alaska