During the monsoon season in Jakarta the global potential of an idea he began working on at the SMART Infrastructure Facility 18 months ago is presently being put to the test.

And it is already saving lives.

A trial is under way that involves members of the public using Twitter to send photos and information about flooding where they are.

In doing so they help emergency services map exactly where flooding is happening so they can better respond.

The opportunity to use Twitter to crowdsource such information in such a way attracted global interest when journalists from around the world attended the launch in Jakarta last November.

That resulted in media exposure in the Wall Street Journal, Australian Financial Review, National Geographic CNN and many other media outlets.

The PetaJakarta trial is the result of the SMART Infrastructure Facility at the University of Wollongong (UOW) bringing people with expertise in various areas together.

Dr Holderness said it all started when SMART Research director Professor Pascal Perez sat him down with Dr Etienne Turpin and they were able to combine their specialisations to come up with the innovative use for Twitter.

Dr Holderness is a Geomatics Research Fellow.

‘‘Technically geomatics is all about making maps and spatial data,’’ he said.

‘‘It is taking information about the earth and producing a map to understand what is going on. In this case we are taking Tweets from people’s phones that have GPS in them so we know where they are and we make a map of flooding. But is could be used for a whole host of different things.  Etienne’s background is in community organisation, sociology and philosophy ... so he is really interested in how people talk about the flooding. 

‘‘We said it would be really good to map some of those conversations to see what is really going on. And could the government use that map to make better decisions and respond in a faster way.’’

The PetaJakarta.org launch involved Twitter Inc and BPBD DKI Jakarta which plays a similar role to SES.

PetaJakarta is seen as a first-in-the-world collaboration between Twitter, a university and a disaster management agency to use social data to both build a working model and provide real-time response to a natural disaster.

‘‘At the beginning of March we will review the monsoon season...to see what we have learnt and then we will publish those findings in a white paper,’’ Dr Holderness said.

‘‘Then we might talk with some others...to see if they are interested. It has been quite phenomenal. During the initial week of testing...we had a couple of hundred thousand people using the system. And then just after Christmas on December 27 there was big rain and flooding. We had a big hit with so many people using the system then.  

''But what is really novel and the thing that nobody else in the world can do is when somebody Tweets about flooding...Twitter allows us to send them a message automatically to invite them to...confirm what they are saying with a photo. The only other organisation in the world that Twitter have ever allowed to do that is FIFA with the recent World Cup.’’ 

Using the information the PetaJakarta.org map is able to show the density of flood-related Tweets in each district. 

Twitter’s Mark Gillis said UOW was awarded one of only first-ever Twitter Data Grants because the PetaJakarta.org program was such an innovative use of social data.