Abstract

Paper
Volunteered Geographic Information for Assessment of the National Infrastructure
Track: Education
Authors: Danny Kahler

Our national civil engineering infrastructure is crumbling. We see it every day in our pavements, our bridges, our water and sewer lines, and our mass transportation. We also watch it on the news; levees failing, gas pipelines exploding, structures collapsing.

Once politicians and reporters start investigating these failures, a common story often appears in much of the testimony and eyewitness reports; that warning signs of these failures were recognized by workers and other members of the public, only to be reported to the wrong officials who didn't understand the problem, didn't know who was responsible for it, or didn't know who to call to elevate the situation. Some may call this a failure to "connect the dots", but it's probably just an outcome of the bureaucratic way our business and government employees are trained; to report information up the chain of command and to relay orders down the chain on command.

One of the predominant factors in the authority over infrastructure is geographic location. Responsibilities in business and government are usually divided up into States, Counties, Cities, District, and Service Areas. The problem is, though, that even if a public citizen notices where a problem is, they don't know who owns that infrastructure asset and, even if they did, they rarely know who to call. Infrastructure owners however, should know where all their assets are and often know the other infrastructure owners who share assets in those geographic corridors.

What if all a citizen had to do is go to a computer-based map and point "Here's where a problem is, and here's what I saw"? If the location chosen is anywhere close to an infrastructure asset, the owners of that asset should have some idea about whether or not anything that they own is part of the problem. Other asset owners will also have the ability to see reported problems, to see if there is any threat of the problem growing that threatening their assets.

Citizens will need an easy way to get their information into a VGI system. The two obvious ways are real-time GPS-enabled mobile devices or a web-based interface for desktop browsing to an area of interest to pick the problem location with a mouse click. Both will need to be available, if only for the practical reason that we don't want to encourage drivers to try to tag infrastructure problem areas on their mobile device while they're trying to safely operate a vehicle.

Engineers responsible for the national infrastructure need new professional practice models to help them accept, analyze, accurately assess, and act on information volunteered by the general public. Otherwise the incoming "chatter" will devolve into useless data that no one acts on. This session will focus on innovative ideas for new concepts and practice models that engineers could adopt to make VGI for engineering a practical reality.