Our Idea

• If you’re a user: You’re driving your way home or having a walk in your favourite park, and suddenly you spot a fire nearby. What do you do? You could call firefighters of course, but you are unsure whether someone has already done that. That’s one of the many times when Firespotting kicks in: it provides you the real-time details on the reported fires; if that one isn’t one of them, you can report it yourself by sending the photo and your position. Then, if you’re in danger Firespotting can help you (if you’re online) to find an hideout, or just help you to be safe, with suggestions designed for you (location and specific information given in the subscription phase); or (if you’re offline) with an handbook with general “To dos”. Finally, let your beloved ones know you’re safe thanks to “Safering”.
• If you’re a firefighter: Suddenly at the fire station comes up an alert: a civil notifies that in a certain place a fire is catching on. While firefighters get ready to extinguish the fire, Firespotting’s operator can alert citizien in danger.

Technical Details

Every time an alert is issued to the system, the geospatial data of the alert are related to other reports to determine the approximated area of the fire. An approximated priority of the alert is calculated via a trivial algorithm using the Fire Weather Index (FWI) of the zone in wich the alerts are located. The FWI comes from the NASA GFWED dataset, is downloaded by a separate component once a day in NetCDF format and put in a MongoDB instance to be accessed via geospatial queries. The system uses this data to determine a danger factor and send a notification in a "dangerous area".

Our Resources

• Global FWI index daily calculated by GEOS5
• Panoply, to explore GEOS5's dataset

Costs (afforded by the system to be deployed in production)

• Server costs
• Maps usage costs (es. Google Maps)
• Employees salaries

Also, it's mandatory providing a budget for marketing purposes e.g. commercials, social network ads.

Funding can be initially obtained via:

• Straightforward loans
• ESA calls
• Venture capitals
• Acceleration programs (e.g. Climate KIC)
• Incubators (e.g. Copernicus Incubator)
• Crowdfunding

In the long term, we are confident that the project will also be supported by sponsors and voluntary donations, since the great humanitarian aid that the application offers.