Yesterday, DigitalGlobe started a crowd-sourcing mission to help volunteers locate the Boeing 777 airplane that disappeared over the weekend while flying from Malaysia to Beijing. They're asking volunteers to log onto its Tomnod website to look for clues and tag locations that may link to the missing aircraft.
"For people who aren’t able to drive a boat through the Pacific Ocean to get to the Malaysian peninsula, or who can’t fly airplanes to look there, this is a way that they can contribute and try to help out," said Luke Barrington, senior manager of Geospatial Big Data for DigitalGlobe, told ABC News. “We’ll say, ‘Here are our top ten suspicious or interesting locations. Is it really an aircraft wing that’s been chopped in half or is this some other debris floating on the ocean? We may not be 100% sure, but if this is where I had to go pick a location to go looking for needles in this big haystack, this is where I’d start.”
He addressed the fact that the process may not be completely accurate but it will definitely help narrow down certain suspicious locations.
Crowd-sourcing has become a huge help with mapping devastated areas after natural disasters. DigitalGlobal also launched a crowd-sourcing campaign after the treacherous typhoon hit the Philippines last year.
"Within about 24 hours, thousands of volunteers tagged more than 60,000 objects of interest, and the results were made available to the public and to FirstLook subscribers within hours," he said.
Log on and help out today.
[via Buzzfeed]
