The problem of curating reliable information in a fast-moving disaster is something that the crisis mapping site Ushahidi had been struggling with. The problem has now been addressed by the startup open source platform SwiftRiver that gives users the means to curate and add context to information, filtering by subject, and allowing users to eliminate feeds from certain people or add weight to more reliable sources.
This verification ability to filter live messages has gotten the eye of media outlet, election monitors,and other organization. The information from SMS, Twitter, are sorted, the location is detected, and duplicates are and sorting by keyword from any text, including SMS and Twitter messages, detects the location of incoming content, filters out duplicate content and detects how influential or popular content is online.
The organization website has a number of applications, for online, desktop and mobile, and APIs. While these tools are being used effectively for disaster response, they’ve also proven popular with media outlets and any individual hoping to crunch a torrent of information to make it manageable, and to draw intelligence from it.
