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."

Idiocracy

[idiotnot]

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

Re:

[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".

Time masheen

[SleptThroughClass]

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

Re:

[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:

[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:

[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.com] alexa. If this is encouraged it won't b

Re:

[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:

[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).

OpenStreetMap

[saibot834]

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

Re:

[grcumb]

In TFA, they are refering to OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org], 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

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[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.

Re:

[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 impo

Re:

[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.

OSM State of the Map, Google Our Maps and more

[Lord Satri]

OpenStreetMap can be loaded on the iPhone [brainoff.com] and here's the State of the Map Conference wrap up, the OpenStreetMap conference [slashgeo.org].

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

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

Re:

[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.

Wikipedia copypasta?

[sgbett]

Sounds very similar to claims made about wikipedia.

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

Nice maps from Openstreetmap

[emj]

They have come a long way:
Birmingham [openstreetmap.org]
London [openstreetmap.org]
Stockholm [openstreetmap.org]
Falköping [openstreetmap.org]

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:

[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 l

Re:

[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 f

Re:

[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

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:

[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.

Re:

[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.

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/ [ucsb.edu].

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

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

Re:

[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:

[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:

[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

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.

Re:

[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 e

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 [multimap.com]). In fact I updated it today and have a new blog post about it here [johnmckerrell.com].

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.

Social Control

[Deanasc]

I like some of the map making efforts that the Brits [speedcam.co.uk] are engaged in.

cf. The National Map Corps

[Seanasy]

The USGS uses volunteers with GPS to keep the National Map up-to-date [nationalmap.gov].

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, corr

Two sites

[kbahey]

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

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

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

Really really nice efforts.

The Confluence Project is used this way

[Terje Mathisen]

The Confluence Project http://confluence.org/ [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 [agu.org] 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)