Most definitely! Since its conceptual stages, the intent has always been to build a platform that can take care of the following challenges (which are not well handled by the Ushahidi platform):
- Separating noise from information especially where there is a large influx of reports
- Duplication filtering i.e. handle cases where a report about the same event has been submitted (by different people) more than once
- Verification of the submitted information
How will the integration look like?
The architecture of the integration is still being sketched out so it's yet to be rolled out. However, here are some blue sky thoughts on the same:
- Ability to convert a bucket into a Crowdmap deployment i.e. using Ushahidi as the geo-presentation layer for SwiftRiver
- Delegate realtime sourcing of reports - SMS, RSS, Tweets - to SwiftRiver and push them to a Crowdmap/Ushahidi deployment once they have been processed
- Using buckets to aggregate reports for a specific category and automatically push the drops into Ushahidi
- Any content pushed into Ushahidi from SwiftRiver would be automatically mapped
In this regard, the following sections of Ushahidi's architecture shall have to be revisited or implemented:
- API - authentication, full REST support
- Authorization of external applications
- The administration console
- Presentation of reports