Improving the reproducibility of geospatial scientific workflows: the use of geosocial media in facilitating disaster response

Abstract

Reproducibility is widely regarded as crucial for scientific studies, yet there is still a lack of reproducibility in geospatial research. New sources of crowdsourced geoinformation provide new opportunities, but also complicate the reproducibility situation. Consequently, there is untapped potential in the domain of disaster response to reuse scientific methodology. Shared, executable scientific workflows can help in improving reproducibility. In this paper, we created reproducible scientific workflows for disaster response from three published studies using geosocial media sources. They have been adapted to a scientific workflow management system to investigate and evaluate their suitability for the creation of geospatial footprints of wildfire events from Twitter data. We investigated how scientific workflows adapt to various analytical processes and compared their performance using MODIS active fires data as ground truth. A systematic qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrated that scientific workflows can help increase the reproducibility of geospatial analytics.