UCOSP (Undergraduate Canadian Open Source Project) is a group of Canadian University students who are working on an open source project from different universities. They have joined the Sentinel project to start on a project called GIN (Ground Information Network) which is a technology to improve the organization of information from at-risk areas for genocide.
GIN was inspired from Ushahidi’s collection of data from the Kenyan post-election. We want to abstract the information retrieval of text messages to other mediums as well as create an interface that is intuitive to the analyst who would be manually filtering the incoming information. Since manual processing of the data can be daunting (with 20,000+ messages to be filtered monthly), we are also thinking about automating the information filtering system after the infrastructure is established. On the team are a couple of natural languages processing students who will help with the automation.
At the moment, we have set up a plan for the architecture of the information, and set up tasks to work on. Our project manager, Leemor has designed an API for the backend. Vincent has designed a frontend plan for the appearance for the interface. Jeffrey is working on SMS retrieval. Michelle is working on designing the database and database functions. We are also working with Sisi ni Amani in this effort.