Crowdsourcing the Gulf Oil Spill Map

I haven't posted anything on this blog for a long while probably because some of the problems that I was dealing with took different courses and found an entirely new set of solutions as a result of crowd sourcing technologies. But the major problem still persists, how to integrate community based taxonomies or folksonomies into these collective maps. Here is a great example, the Gulf Oil Spill map mashed-up with geo-tagged videos uploaded on youtube. There is an enormous potential in that rich content for creating a thematic map on top of the geographic one such as; memory routes or personal narratives from local people, fishermen, environmental activists, etc. about how this disaster is affecting their lives which would eventually help us contextualize the hazard map of the physical environment from the locals' perspective.