Abstract
Mapping as an action in volunteered geographic information is complex in light of the human diversity within the volunteer community. There is no integrated solution that models and fixes all data heterogeneity. Instead, researchers are attempting to assess and understand crowdsourced data. Approaches based on statistics are helpful to comprehend trends in crowd-drawing behaviors. This study examines trends in contributors’ first decisions when drawing OpenStreetMap (OSM) buildings. The proposed approach evaluates how important the properties of a point are in determining the first point of building drawings. It classifies the adjacency types of the buildings using a random forest classifier for the properties and aids in inferring drawing trends from the relative impact of each property. To test the approach, detached and attached building groups in Istanbul and Izmir, Turkey, were used. The result had an 83% F-score. In summary, the volunteers tended to choose as first points those further away from the street and building centroid and provided lower point density in the detached buildings than the attached ones. This means that OSM volunteers paid more attention to open spaces when drawing the first points of the detached buildings in the study areas. The study reveals common drawing trends in building-mapping actions.
Highlights
Twenty years ago, if asked what the most popular aspect of geographic information studies was, many people would have answered, ‘the increasing use of geographic information systems’ (GIS)
Assessing the drawing trends among OSM buildings is challenging because buildings are constituted by a limited number of points compared to other geographical features, such as roads, streams, land use, or sea
There is a trend towards drawing the first point where point density is large and close to the street and the centroid
Summary
If asked what the most popular aspect of geographic information studies was, many people would have answered, ‘the increasing use of geographic information systems’ (GIS). Crowdsourced platforms involving spatial data generation by volunteer participants are called volunteered geographical information (VGI) projects. There is no requirement for cartographic qualifications among participants in VGI platforms. Various scientific studies have been carried out to determine whether or not the geographic data generated through VGI can be used for professional purposes, like other maps produced by cartographers. A few studies have directly investigated volunteers’ behavior [4,5,6,7,8]. They examined the geometric and semantic contributions and assessed the activities of volunteers
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