With the current flooding in England affecting millions of homes and still spreading - Oxford is the latest city to be hit by the rising waters - plenty of people are turning to the internet to get the latest information.
Ed Parsons - formerly of Ordnance Survey and now a geospatial technologist at Google - points to a map of flood information being cobbled together by Ollie Williams of BBC Berkshire.
The full map is here, and while at the moment, and for obvious reasons, this only covers one county, I'm sure there are other variants out there. It's a powerful example of how data can be pooled online and added to by individuals.
This is also a useful point to wonder whether information on flooding that is already collated by various arms of government should be made more freely available to members of the public. After all, it was only a couple of weeks ago that property site OnOneMap, which uses Google Maps as its engine, got into a battle over the flood data it was offering browsers.
Because the mapping data showing flood risk is owned by the Environment Agency, they were forced to remove it, an argument we covered in a recent Free our Data piece. And that was before the recent bout of floods in middle England.
