Premise Data

Comments from the Community

1 Comment

1. Alex says:

   September 16, 2017 at 12:46 pm

   Premise

   Premise makes use of crowdsourced observations from a community of users who record and verify information such as market prices and mosquito breeding sites, although economic applications are the strongest use case. The added value here is increased time and space resolved data points. This is done using Android phones and purpose built software that records visual evidence and verifies the content using geolocation and analysis of meta-data such as timestamps. The platform is live in 30 countries including South America and Africa, although it is necessarily limited to areas with reasonable Android penetration.

   End users include NGOs and governmental agencies, data is accessed via a clean and well designed dashboard. The organisation is a social enterprise but its business model sells these insights for profit and the platform is proprietary.

   A potential weakness in the platform arises from the ability to rapidly scale up to new locations and countries. There must be a critical mass of users to make accurate predictions, and those users must be compelled to recruit other users. This process is somewhat fragile and unpredictable. However, deep analysis of visual information has much to add, for example a picture of a shelf in a supermarket can identify not only prices, but brands available, their relative popularity and so on.

   Flowminder

   Flowminder is a foundation that analyses non-traditional data sources such as (anonymised) mobile phone records and satellite imagery to provide data with high spatial and temporal accuracy. This relies on state of the art techniques from academia that are applied to areas such as population density, age distribution and migration.

   Specific cases include the combination of detailed census data that may be 10 years old, a country level total population estimate from a demographic institute and satellite imagery. Numerical techniques exist to combine these in such a way that up to date, sub-national data may be inferred.

   Flowminder describes its methodologies in open access scientific journals and all data products are freely available via a very easy to use and highly available data portal. These can be used for downstream analysis in GIS or other software. Generally the ideal user is data literate and able to write basic code for analysis.

   New data products and analyses are in response to requests and funding from organisations such as Gates Foundation.

   Akvo RSR

   Akvo RSR (Really Simple Reporting) is a tool that allows easy synthesis and publishing of data collected for Monitoring and Evaluation purposes. It is a not for profit foundation (the US arm is a 501(3)c organisation) that offers RSR alongside other products.

   RSR allows all projects to be managed together including milestones, metrics, project management and associated data whether structured (e.g. CSV) or rich (images, videos, documents).

   RSR offers a tool that is purpose built for complex development projects with multiple stakeholders. The ability to easily share reports via a website allows for constant updating of results. The software is priced according to the number of projects to be managed, beginning at 2,800 EUR per year for 20 projects.
   Myanmar Information Management Unit
   MIMU is a portal that hosts data from Myanmar on development projects from various sectors including agriculture, gender, governance and WASH. It is an effort of the UN resident coordinator’s office in Myanmar. The purpose is to compile data from various humanitarian and development projects across the country, for which the UN resident coordinator is uniquely positioned to provide a bird’s eye view.

   The available data covers structured data, textual reports and spatial data such as maps and is focused along the 3Ws of Who does What, Where. This is combined with baseline data on demographic information such as population.

   While limited to a single country, this appears to be a comprehensive source of information for Myanmar. The model of UN Resident Coordinator led portals to combine data and projects underway is valuable. An ideal beneficiary would not only be a consumer of currently available data, but also a funding organisation seeking to fill knowledge gaps by surveying ongoing projects.

   aWhere

   aWhere is an established agricultural intelligence company having operated for nearly 20 years. The main value added is the synthesis of weather and agricultural signals to provide information to farmers and small land owners on expected yields and predicted agricultural information. This is delivered through a dashboard, with an associated API for developers, and an SMS alert delivery platform.

   aWhere does offer services aimed directly at developing countries and markets susceptible to food insecurity, however the core market appears to be the US and it is not clear the data that is used outside of these developed markets where high resolution data on weather and land cover are not reliable.

   aWhere offers deep knowledge on agritech, developed over many years with strong leadership on core science but appears to be relatively inexperienced in developing markets.

   WhereIsMyTransport

   WhereIsMyTransport is a platform that collects information on transport routes, schedules and fares in 21 countries across the Middle East and Africa. The data appears to be collected both passively, using GPS devices and actively from user volunteered data such as prices via a mobile app. This is applied to both formal networks such as public funded routes as well as informal routes from private operators. Previously mobility has been mapped using expensive and sparse surveys or data collected passively from mobile phones which is proprietary, sensitive and potentially skewed.

   This is a valuable service as an understanding of urban mobility is critical for many downstream development outcomes from crime to air quality. Often public services are not able to answer demand and informal and flexible services offered by 3rd parties meet this demand.

   The service offers an API for developers to build upon which is free. This positions the platform well for uptake by developers and 3rd parties.