we also found this same phenomenon during the February bush-fires in Victoria. People were being reported missing - and one way to work out priority for cases was by number of times a person was reported missing.
But having said that some way of identifying duplicates - even some statistical measure of the likelihood of a report being a duplicate would be useful. A statistical distance between reports that looks at a number of dimensions like time, spatial & attributes. Damn I wish i was coming to wherecamp so I work on hacking this we did write something to measure the closeness-in-time on another project. you can check it out here http://github.com/sabman/time-tree/tree/master This is a digression but an interesting one: Essentially we wrote it coz we needed it to workout the location of a spot on the sea floor that was GPS time stamped and had GPS lat/lon. But this was not the true location of the underwater camera & there was another file which contained lat/lon based on underwater acoustics. Problem was that there was not an exact match b/w GPS time and acoustic beacon. Time-tree can find the closest match in a time series when give a time and max time offset. Plus it has a tree structure for storing time so when searching it can quite quickly converge on the closest time. free free to fork it :) _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
