How to Add Location Information to Mobile Content data sheet 5418 Views
Author:
Melissa Ulbricht
Abstract:
This how-to focuses on the tools and techniques that you can use to add location-based information to mobile content.
Location information can add value to your stories and content and can help journalists who report on specific communities, reporters who create venue-specific multimedia, or citizen journalists who cover events in which location is relevant.
Location information has many advantages: It provides more context. It helps journalists and publishers find an interested audience; users searching for information around specific locations will most easily find information that is tagged with a location. Location information lends itself to aggregation; content with location information can be put on maps and other visualizations, which makes it more appealing for audiences to examine. Through this, it can be used in pattern-finding. Aggregations may show interesting patterns that would not be evident from individual reports. Finally, location information can leverage social media.
PoiMapper: Mobile Data Collection Through Points-of-Interest in Kenya data sheet 3260 Views
PoiMapper, a product from Pajat, is a mobile application for data collection, hosting, and sharing. It works on a feature phone with Java capability and allows a user to design a case-specific questionnaire to collect field data, including numbers, text, and photo images. Through this, it supports the collection of point-of-interest (POI) data -- hence the name, PoiMapper -- and is currently being tested in this capacity in Kenya in collaboration with Plan Kenya, Plan Finland, Helsinki University of Technology, and University of Nairobi. The pilot is ongoing and an evaluation is to be done a month from now.
A few weeks ago, the Open Mobile Consortium and MobileActive.org hosted the first Open Mobile Camp. Discussions focused on open source mobile development and how mobile tools can and are being used in humanitarian work. Here are two profiles of interesting projects that were presented at the Camp.
The Humanitarian FOSS Project (H-FOSS) offers summer internships for undergraduate computing students who want to get involved in building free and open source software for humanitarian organizations. As part of H-FOSS, students from Trinity College designed a phone-based tool for search and rescue missions, scientific field-work, and other applications. Called POSIT (Portable Open Search and Information Tool), the application runs on the Android platform. In this video, H-FOSS project director Trishan de Lanerolle and Trinity College students Prasanna Gautam and Christopher Fei present POSIT.
Location information can add value to your stories and content and can help journalists who report on specific communities, reporters who create venue-specific multimedia, or citizen journalists who cover events in which location is relevant. 
