Online Collaboration Creates 'Map-Making For the Masses'

The Science Daily site has up a piece on the effect user-generated content can have on map-making. Scientists are appreciative of the data enthusiastic mappers can provide, updating maps on changes in local geographic information. "Goodchild's paper looks at volunteered geographic information as a special case of the more general Web phenomenon of user-generated content. It covers what motivates large numbers of individuals (often with little formal qualifications) to take part, what technology allows them to do so, how accurate the results are and what volunteered geographic information can add to more conventional sources of such information."

Comments

Idiocracy

[idiotnot]

Why, when seeing this story, did I immediately think of the search for the "Time Masheen?"

Re:Idiocracy

[smittyoneeach]

I dunno. My first thought was Bugs Bunny popping out of the ground, consulting his map, and declaiming: "I should have taken a left turn at Lah-Joe-la".

OpenStreetMap

[saibot834]

In TFA, they are refering to OpenStreetMap, a wiki-style project to create free street maps. (though this is not mentioned in the summary)

Re:OpenStreetMap

[grcumb]

In TFA, they are refering to OpenStreetMap, a wiki-style project to create free street maps. (though this is not mentioned in the summary)

I love these guys. I live in Vanuatu, a tiny South Pacific country that so far has escaped the attention of the Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft map interfaces. The only way we're going to get decent maps of our towns is by doing it ourselves. Thanks to a few thoughtful people from Australia and the US, we now have a GPS and are mapping all the streets of Port Vila, the capital.

Few people have computer experience, but we managed to recruit a young man from a local NGO's youth project, and he's been spending the last few weeks riding around in a local mini-bus run by a family member of his. I've already uploaded some of the raw data, and with any luck we'll have some decent maps of the town before too long.

What I like best about Open Street Maps is that their format is compatible with Google Maps. This means that if the stars align themselves properly, we'll be on the map fairly soon.

Re:OpenStreetMap

[Anonymous Coward]

You poor man, you have to go through an undersea cable through Australia's already crappy internet setup.. Hopefully Rudd will keep his promises and upgrade our internet..

Re:OpenStreetMap

[digitalchinky]

The upshot is that it only took 7 minutes to map out the entire island with one of your crazy taxi drivers :-) I kid! I kid!

Re:OpenStreetMap

[E.R.]

Even here in Europe where we do have maps from Google, Microsoft, $you_name_it, an open map does have advantages. First, open data allows you to highlight the map features that are important to you. One of the things that seems to become popular in openstreetmap is generating bicycle maps. Likewise, you can make a map that highlights schools and universities, hiking paths or churches. And you are allowed to publish the maps you make, without getting any written permission or paying royalties.

The second important advantage of open data is that you can bring them over to any device or convert them to any desired format. I'm currently using only OSM maps on my GPS device. I cannot do that with Microsoft's data (it is prohibited by the EULA, and it's probably not technically possible unless you're a Microsoft employee).

Re:OpenStreetMap

[orangesunglasses]

The openstreetmap project hasmade quite a lot of progress, For example, they have mapped the entire Isle of man in much more detail than google etc. They have also been donated data to help with the project.

Re:OpenStreetMap

[SleptThroughClass]

Unfortunately, the map created by one of their crazy taxi drivers was of New York City. The only taxi drivers still at home are their sane ones.

Wikipedia copypasta?

[sgbett]

Sounds very similar to claims made about wikipedia.

If http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html is anything to go by I suspect web 2.0 maps will have just as many (few?) errors as the dead tree counterparts.

Re:screwmyminicity.com

[MichaelSmith]

I clicked on it then I thought for about one second that it was going to redirect to myminicity.com and that I had been done again.

Re:screwmyminicity.com

[KlaymenDK]

I'd say you're rather reckless, but I can't argue with your motivation. You're right, the 'net needs some form of measure to counter link spamming, seeing as how links *are* the Internet and those links are what brings --or diminishes-- its value. And, seeing as how the Internet is all but based on anarchy, your solution is quite appropriate. Let's drown those fsckers.

Re:screwmyminicity.com

[sgbett]

who exactly are you talking to?

I see no myminicity link. In fact the only myminicity links I see are when I go to your "scremyminicity" website, which asks people to put a 'redirector' in which then links to myminicity, in an effort to "punish" them with traffic.

Reminds of the bit in magic roundabout when dougal is force fed sugar cubes...

Re:screwmyminicity.com

[jacquesm]

the thing that really ticked me off is when they stopped using the direct links but started abusing tinyurl and dwarfurl and social engineering to cloak the links, it would be about 20 minutes of coding and testing for the /code guys to fix that (show you the end-target of a redirected link) which would at least stop the social engineering attempts.

The biggest problem is it works, check myminicity.com on http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/myminicity.com alexa. If this is encouraged it won't be long before you get 100's of these clowns drowning out all normal conversation. We've already lost usenet and email to spam, I'll be damned if linkspam is going to kill online fora, kill them while they're small. Set an example. I'm sure if the original inventors of spam email had their offices burned to the ground on day #2 of their enlightened campaign it would have set back the idea of mass mailings a couple of years.

Also, /. isn't the only forum that is being pestered like this, I already saw myminicity.com links in other places. If their business model is to harness their users into linkspamming I think they deserve to go down in flames.

Nice maps from Openstreetmap

[emj]

They have come a long way:
Birmingham
London
Stockholm
Falköping

There aren't that many people maping (1000?), and you can really make a great differance by just adding all pathways you use for your daily strolls..

Re:Nice maps from Openstreetmap

[Bazman]

I just went for a bike ride and strapped my GPS to the handlebars and set it tracking. When I got back home I cycled round my block a couple of times to get a good track, knowing that the streets aren't in OSM at the moment. I dumped the track to my PC using EasyGPS and added it to OSM using the Java JOSM client, and hit upload.

Then I looked at how the rest of my bike ride jived with the existing data. For half my ride I should have been under 20 foot of water in the local river, and for the rest of it it looked like I was bunny-hopping across a major road every few hundred metres.

My GPS is a Garmin GPS12 I bought about 8 years ago. Has GPS technology improved so much since then? It was mostly reading an EPE (estimated position error) of 5 to 10 metres.

Either people have 1-metre accurate GPS units now or everyone on OSM is tracing google maps!

B

Re:Nice maps from Openstreetmap

[protolith]

You ran into the fundamental weakness in most GPS Systems. The x and y are relatively easy to get. the z is always less accurate.

I used to use a Trimble TDC1 ($12,000 near survey grade GPS) with Realtime differential correction.
With 20 points collected on a position and post processing, the x and y were good to about 10 cm yet the Z was usually only good to roughly the nearest meter.

In order to get better results. The GPS antenna needed a large plate attached to act as a shield to block the radio waves from reflecting off the ground and interfering with the data collection, data collection must be more intense. We would usually collect between 1000 and 2000 points With realtime differential correction. after post processing the x and y would be good to the millimeter, yet z was then good to around the cm.

This was roughly 6-8 years ago, now with selective accuracy turned off, it is easier for lower end units to perform in the sub 10 m accuracy.

The quickest way to a decent topographic profile of a path is to record the path (as you did) and calculate the intersection of that path with as good a DEM (digital elevation model) as you can get a hold of.

Re:Nice maps from Openstreetmap

[Bazman]

Ah maybe I wasn't clear. When I said it put me under the river I didn't mean Z-height, just that it had shifted me far enough off the path I was on to think I was in the middle of a 50-metre wide river...

Anyhow, if you look at multiple GPS traces on OSM, they look accurate to the metre, whereas my track was all over the place. Is it likely that vehicular GPS units snap their coords to their inbuilt road network? I think OSM are happy that this doesn't constitute a 'derived work' of some copyright maps, but IANAL...

Re:Nice maps from Openstreetmap

[emj]

Yes new GPS units have several advantages, one of the greatest is better algorithms for locking on to sattelites, and are very accurate. ATM what you want is a Sirf III chipset, nothing less.

Re:Nice maps from Openstreetmap

[Anonymous Coward]

OSM are NOT happy this is the case. It is always recommended to have this set off, since the data collected with this on IS a derived work.
It may just be that other people have better GPS devices, or the satellite constellation on that day could have been particularly poor.

There is always the option to trace roads from Yahoo's aerial imagery.

Heres the actual paper

[jrcsnet]

This was presented at the Volunteer Geographic Information conference in Dec 2007, see http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/.

The paper that TFA references can be found at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/position/Goodchild_VGI2007.pdf

Another presentation on Openstreetmap from the same conference is at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/present/Coast_openstreetmap-opendata.pdf

Re:Heres the actual paper

[Anonymous Coward]

In a democracy, there is no reason why good terrain/positioning data is not freely available for any location that is within view of public lands. Positioning data for public lands can be acquired from multiple averaging of GPS derived measurements and other data. Private lands and other non-public lands (such as military reservations) can be view in part from positions on the periphery or from aircraft. Photographic and surveying derived methods can be used to produce positioning information. The acquisition of all of this data (public lands and publicly viewable lands) is mostly governed by accessibility, some location which only sees a person-visit once a century might not be positioned very quickly. Places which see thousands of person-visits per day will be positioned quite quickly.

Re:screwmyminicity.com

[sgbett]

Indeed, but in this thread? Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough.

Formal qualifications..

[Anonymous Coward]

"often with little formal qualifications"

I'm really beginning to dislike the western prejudice that if you have no formal education you are somehow a piece of crap and stop learning and are somehow universally and globally more incompetent then someone with credentials. Anyone can read a street sign and update a map, there are many things people can do just as well and better then experts despite their lack of training, a credential says you worked hard for a particular institution for a period of time and had no extenuating negative circumstances enough to take you off that course.

Their is this religious priestlyness to education that underlies Oswald Spenglers point about the religious conception of societies knowledge.

Re:Formal qualifications..

[DeeQ]

Their is this religious priestlyness to education that underlies Oswald Spenglers point about the religious conception of societies knowledge. Would you trust someone to update a map if they can't use the right there?

Re:Formal qualifications..

[Skater]

Actually, not everyone can update maps. It does require some training and even still is frequently done incorrectly.

I work for an organization that has people going out and mapping and listing houses all over the US. Some do very well. Some do quite poorly. We see things that are obviously wrong even though we're not familiar with the area being worked.

I do agree that formal education (college or whatever) is irrelevant. In our case, the biggest factor is whether or not the person can read a map (there are plenty of educated people out there that can't), but it's not the only factor.

Re:Formal qualifications..

[raised eyebrow]

Would you trust someone to update a map if they can't use the right there? Yes I do and so do most other map users: they just don't know it. Ordnance Survey, for example, does not require formal qualifications of a very large fraction of their map editors rather than the ability to edit the map to meet their other cartographic standards, as a dyslexic colleague of mine happily found. It's inevitable some map editors will be illiterate and also that simple mistakes will be made, as in any other occupation. This is what QA is for :o)

Re:Formal qualifications..

[theskipper]

I think Ms. Teen South Carolina would agree with your central thesis.

Re:Formal qualifications..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, none of the above. She's just your typical dumb southern christian broad with a smokin' hot ass and nice tits to match.

She'll marry the equivalent southern christian jock and pump out some equally clueless southern christian rugrats and the cycle will continue.

Re:Formal qualifications..

[trolltalk.com]

"She was on TV, cut her a break, it's quite possible she couldn't function under the stress"

Riiiight ... like everyone cracks the first time they're in front of a large audience ... and like this was the first time she was in front of a large audience.

Oops - neither of those was the case.

The simple truth is (1) she had nothing to say, and (2) she used too many words to say it.

Give her a few years and she'll be running for office. Unfortunately, her non-message resonates with a certain part of the electorate.

... and yes, I've been on TV newscasts more than a dozen times ... you learn to pretty much ignore the cameras after the first few seconds, and let the camera guys do their job.

Using OSM on existing map sites.

[mcknut]

I've put together a little bookmarklet that lets you use OSM maps on Google maps and Multimap API implementations (and in fact multimap.com). In fact I updated it today and have a new blog post about it here.

It can be really useful when you find a site that has useful data but you want to see that data overlaid on OSM maps. On Multimap's site you can also see routes and lots of other POIs overlaid on the OSM maps too.

Re:screwmyminicity.com

[stewbacca]

Reminds of the bit in magic roundabout when dougal is force fed sugar cubes...

Well, that's lost on about 99.99% of the American slashdotters. (This firmly puts me in the .01% of Americans who have the slightest clue what you are talking about, heh).

Uh... maps?

[YourExperiment]

Of course not everyone can, uh... update maps. I personally believe the U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps. Like you said, formal education is uh... irrelevant, like South Africa and uh, such as the Iraq. We need to help our education over here in the U.S. and the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for updating the maps.

Social Control

[Deanasc]

I like some of the map making efforts that the Brits are engaged in.

cf. The National Map Corps

[Seanasy]

The USGS uses volunteers with GPS to keep the National Map up-to-date.

TomTom mapshare explanation and cheatcode

[SimHacker]

TomTom's "MapShare" technology lets users correct maps and generate their own content. You can actually correct the problems on the TomTom device when you encounter them, so they're applied to your map immediately, and they're uploaded and shared with other users when you hot-sync your TomTom with your PC. Of course you can also download other user's corrections. You can choose to only use corrections you made yourself, or download corrections verified by TomTom, corrections to POIs you subscribe to, corrections from trusted sources, corrections reported by many people, or corrections reported by some people. Of course (as demonstrated in the following video), sometimes a goof-ball gets ahold of the cheat code, and messes everything up for everybody, so you may not want to download any change that haven't been reported by many people! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU2iQX4vJ10 -Don

OSM State of the Map, Google Our Maps and more

[Lord Satri]

OpenStreetMap can be loaded on the iPhone and here's the State of the Map Conference wrap up, the OpenStreetMap conference.

And collaborative mapping is big deal. Google recently launched Google Our Maps, which is basically Google My Maps but with collaboration capabilities.

From my previous comment: There's NAVTEQ's MapReporter tool to submit updates to NAVTEQ's data by the casual user, [and also] Tele Atlas' Map Insight and TomTom's MapShare.

Re:OSM State of the Map, Google Our Maps and more

[Vulva R. Thompson, P]

Regarding the map update links, is there any reason to bother submitting new/updated street data? The only benefit is to Nokia and Tom-tom, both large publicly traded companies. Their proprietary datasets costs tens of thousands of dollars to license and you're saving them money in physical mapping costs while getting nothing in return.

It's not like the updates benefit a publicly accessible database like Tiger or Openstreetmap.

Two sites

[kbahey]

Two sites that are fine examples of collaborative creation of maps and adding info to maps are:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/
A from scratch volunteer effort to map the world using GPS, as people visit places.

http://wikimapia.org/
An overlay on Google Maps where people can mark their landmarks and comment on others.

Really really nice efforts.

Time masheen

[SleptThroughClass]

Well, first just buy the Time Travel Theory and then build your time machine.

The Confluence Project is used this way

[Terje Mathisen]

The Confluence Project http://confluence.org/ is an international effort to perform a systematic sampling of the Earth's surface, i.e. all those locations where both longitude and latitude has integer values.

So far more than 10,000 visitors have documented more than 5,000 of these points.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027768.shtml is a link to a paper by a Japanese researcher (Koki Iwao) and his associates: They have used the DCP information to check/verify the quality of the various land cover databases:

Which parts of the Earth is mountains/lakes/forests/rice fields/grassland/etc.?

What they found is that the best of these databases have a hit ratio of just 60% or less.

Terje
(Scandinavian DCP coordinator)

Digital Urban.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.digitalurban.blogspot.com/

The above links to a blog that covers some of the aspects of Google Earth.

WAAS

[LWATCDR]

Your GPS probably lacks WAAS "is WAAS available in the EU?" And or DGPS.
Both of those will get you down to around 1-2 Meter resolution.

Re:WAAS "EGNOS"

[Bazman]

The european equivalent of WAAS appears to be called 'EGNOS'. Yeah, my GPS doesn't have it. I bought it very shortly after the US switched off the SA thing and I whooped when I realised I'd get 10m resolution!

Re:WAAS "EGNOS"

[LWATCDR]

Well that is your answer. Now some GPS systems with dedicated base stations are now getting down to like 1cm.But they tend to be very expensive.