Slashdot Mirror
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."
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