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Online Collaboration Creates 'Map-Making For the Masses'

Posted by Zonk on from the many-hands-make-light-work dept.

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."

3 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. OpenStreetMap by saibot834 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  2. Nice maps from Openstreetmap by emj · · Score: 4, Informative

    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..

  3. Heres the actual paper by jrcsnet · · Score: 5, Informative

    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