The sms2geo project in Haiti

There have been a number of impressive technical mini-projects and platforms arising out of the Haiti response effort by the technology community around the world. One of these projects has been the new sms2geo service created by the InSTEDD team. sms2geo was created to parse location, using people and machines, out of text messages. Right now, anyone in Haiti can text a message to +46-737-494-537 text like

' we need the location of Ecole professional casini ave maglanbloise a carrefour feuilles'

From this you get the reply. The reply is first based on queries to the constantly updated Nominatim and OpenStreetMap tool, and also to Google's nameservers. Regardless of whether the SMS message was able to be geolocated automatically, it still has to go through verification by a person in order to be trusted as accurate enough to respond upon. This is done through crowdsourcing of local knowledge, where people who know the city and country work to find the actual spot on the map. On the web side, this looks very simple, and it works brilliantly:

If you know Haiti, you can help by processing SMS messages that need geolocation through the web queue interface.