Nat Geo’s PR firm contacted me about this effort, which I actually heard about from the GeoRev team at ESRI UC.
The PR headline: Imagine an expedition with a field staff of 10,000. How about 100,000? It’s possible!
Support by National Geographic Digital Media, Field Expedition: Mongolia – Valley of the Khans sends “real-time data, satellite imagery from GeoEye’s IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellites, maps, and other information” to interested folks at home. They are looking for “on-the-ground anomalies – anomalies that could indicate sites of cultural heritage. Once candidate locations are pinpointed online by web users, they will be ground-truthed in real-time by the expedition team concurrently working in the field.”
So far about 4,000 individuals have participated, processing 190,000 satellite images. I thought the effort might use Mechanical Turk to divvy up the tasks. Nope. “Dr. Albert Lin, the primary researcher on the ground, invented the technology that makes this method of archaeology crowdsourcing a reality.”
There are only eight more days left for the crowdsourcing part, so if you want to participate, best get started soon.
