Participation in Space App Camp, the Netherlands 2014

Two members of the Live+Gov project, namely Dimitrios Ververidis and George Liaros, were qualified to visit the European Space Agency (www.esa.int) facilities in the Netherlands in order to be informed about the latest earth monitoring achievements. The agenda of the training, named as SpaceAppCamp, started in 4 of May with the presentation of EGNOS and Copernicus programs. The following days were dedicated into presenting information for accessing the data, a tour in the exhibition of space missions, and a small programming competition in the end (12 of May).

During the SpaceAppCamp, the 20 qualified developers had to find and partially implement an idea for a mobile application that has potential financial interest for ESA. The developers were grouped into 5 teams where each team had to treat a certain area. Our team, joined with Michalis Vitos and Julia Altenbuchner from the University College of London (UCL), was to enhance an app that enables illiteral people of the rain-forests to report abuse of their territory such as illegal logging. The app was initially developed by UCL. The improvements made during SpaceAppCamp were the recording of paths in the forest and the submition of the paths to a back-end web portal as it is seen in the Figure. The app is named as Sapelli, the name of a special tree. The financial aspect of Sapelli is that NGO’s can use it to validate the reports of local communities of Africa about illegal logging and territory interferences. The maps used were the Google maps enhanced by the latest radar image of Sentinel 1. This camp was an excellent opportunity for Live+Gov members to exploit the expertise that has been developed in the project (in terms of turning simple citizens into the living sensors of their city/territory) for developing a mobile app that makes smart use of the high-quality content offered by ESA.