WikiConference India 2016/Submissions/Evaluating CrowdSourced Cartography
| Main page | Hackathon | Programs | Edit-a-thon | Press coverage | FAQ | Sitemap |
- Title of the submission
Evaluating CrowdSourced Cartography
- Your Username (For the submission author)
JaitegSingh (Link)
- Type of presentation
Workshop on theme Open source software and technology
- Abstract (in about 300 words)
Cartography or map-making, has been an integral part of the human history for many thousand years. Through the Ages of Exploration to till today people have created and used maps as essential tools to help them for boundary demarcation, planning, defense, explain and navigate their way through the world. Just a few years ago, mapping was primarily used in the car for navigation. But now it enables everything from lucrative location based services to game-changing autonomous driving (Newcomb, 2014). In regard to the geographical data the crowd-sourced movement is also known as volunteered geographic information(VGI). Recent advances in computer technology has enabled wiki cation of maps (Sui, 2008). Availability of portable satellite navigation GPS devices and inexpensive smart-phones with GPS functionality motivated users to contribute. Easy to use mapping website interfaces helped the users to upload information. For example, crowdSourcing produces plentiful labelled data at no cost. The CrowdSourced maps such as OpenStreetMap produces huge spatial data, with less effort and researcher would work on the devising method to use the data rather than collecting the data. As many prior studies in algorithmic learning considered smaller training sizes due to traditional costs of labelling. Now there may be greater benefits to such learning techniques as coverage of many places around the world, where there was no or limited coverage done commercial vendors is now available because of crowdsourcing. Governmental agencies such as Ordnance Survey (UK), National Imagery and Mapping Agency (USA), Remote Sensing India keeps on investing huge amounts for mapping done on their lands. Big companies in mapping business like Google, Nokia, Tom-Tom, Tele Atlas and Mapmyindia see huge market for such data as they see increased integration of non-geographically focused applications with geospatial data. Google spends $1bn annually maintaining their maps, and that does not include the money for acquiring other companies. In 2007 Nokia acquired NavTeq, in 2006, Microsoft acquired the Imagery and Remote Sensing Company Vexcel. In 2014 Google spent $1.5bn buying the navigation company Waze (Newcomb,2014). With GPS in every car, and a smartphone whether Android or Iphone in every pocket, the market for telling you where you are and where to go has become fierce. Both Google and Apple collect your location information when you use their services. Google has already announced that is going to use this information to track the correlation between searches and where you go. It seems inevitable that Google will monetise geographic searches, with either premium results, or priority ordering (Wroclawski,2014). One can't ignore the societal implication of so much data in the hands of a single entity, no matter how benevolent it claims to be. OpenStreetMap respects communities, their work and privacy. OpenStreetMap is both neutral and transparent. License terms allow the user to download data use it for the applications and analysis. OpenStreetMap license terms does not constraint user to use it on single device. It's possible to use OpenStreetMap data to navigate without giving your location away to anyone as it provides the offline dataset usage. OpenStreetMap is world leader in collecting map data contributed by users. But users are of different backgrounds and have varying level of mapping experience. This makes map data more vulnerable to errors and incomplete. OpenStreetMap uses loose coordination and no top-down quality assurance processes. The growing demand on geospatial services requires an emphasized study on geo-information from various sources covering the same geographic space. OSM can be used to reflect the rapidly changing geographical data. The most common approach is recording map data using a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver and edit the recorded information using one of the various freely available editors such as JOSM or Merkaator (Steiniger and Hunter, 2012). The users provide additional information about the collected data by adding attributes and store the final results in the OpenStreetMap database. Users do not require any specialized GPS receiver for mapping, as it has been tested that smartphones (Golicher, 2013) can be considered as device for mapping. The accuracy of GPS has been checked and found satisfactory. Microsoft Bing supports the project by providing various aerial images as background layer. The Problem with this layer is it can be outdated as no uniform coverage is provided. Hence it would be of great help if, the open source community can be facilitated the fundamentals of map making along with actual demonstration of common data quality issues associated with cartography. The probable topics to be included in workshop are: 1. Basics of Cartography, Mapping, Visualization using OpenStreetMaps(OSM) 2. Basics of Remote Sensing (and visual interpretation of satellite images) 3. Basics of Geographical Information Systems (and possible applications) 4. Basics of Global Positioning Systems (including applications) 5. Geospatial Applications in Natural Resources Management 6. Mapping with GIS, Printing and Reproduction of Maps 7. Recording GPS coordinates using android phone 8. Using JOSM for cartography
References: • Doug Newcomb. Telenav's switch to open source mapping allows for more frequent software updates and traffic reports, May 2014. URL http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458392,00.asp. • Daniel Z. Sui. The wiki cation of GIS and its consequences: Or angelina jolie's new tattoo and the future of GIS. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 32(1): 1{5, January 2008. ISSN 01989715. doi: 10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2007.12.001. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2007.12.001. • Serge Wroclawski. Why the world needs OpenStreetMap technology, January 2014. URL http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/14/why-the-world-needs-openstreetmap. • Stefan Steiniger and Andrew J. S. Hunter. OpenJUMP HoRAE{a free GIS and toolbox for home-range analysis. 36(3):600{608, 2012. ISSN 1938-5463. doi: 10.1002/wsb.168. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/wsb.168. • Duncan Golicher. Accuracy of an android cell phone GPS in the UK, accessed on 13th august 2014, 2013. URL http://duncanjg.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/ accuracy-of-an-android-cell-phone-gps-in-the-uk/.
- Result
Accepted