Abstract
This study presents results from an on-going social map service pilot that supports a national mapping agency (NMA) in data collection. Results from the pilot show that a VGI map service benefits both citizens and the NMA; the data quality is high enough to suit the needs of an NMA; citizens obtain a means to contribute and be involved in ameliorating maps. The social map service works also as a citizen-to-citizen communication channel as all the contributions are immediately visible to all users. Based on the results of this study, VGI should be further integrated with NMA processes in the future. One way of improving the integration are via services offered to both citizens and NMA employees that borrow features from existing social network services but also from popular games. Commenting, voting and gamification elements can be integrated with the VGI services to benefit both citizens and NMAs. Due to the numerous challenges of VGI the European national mapping agencies involvement in using citizens as data collectors is low. It is, however, within the NMA’s grasp to develop the role of VGI in NMA processes further and to make VGI collection fun.
Highlights
The rise and success of different volunteered geographic information (VGI) activities (Goodchild 2007), together with increasing technological advances, have prompted national mapping agencies (NMAs) to consider the possibilities of using crowdsourced geographic information in topographic data collection
NMAs have been reluctant to get involved with VGI due to numerous challenges such as data quality, contributor motivation and legal issues (Olteanu-Raimond et al 2017a)
We first explain the main principles behind the social map service that we developed in Sect
Summary
The rise and success of different volunteered geographic information (VGI) activities (Goodchild 2007), together with increasing technological advances, have prompted national mapping agencies (NMAs) to consider the possibilities of using crowdsourced geographic information in topographic data collection. The features that the USGS collects are limited to a few predefined point-type data features, such as schools (Jackson et al 2013), hospitals and other public buildings In all of these existing crowdsourcing services, the collected data are mostly point-type hints about map errors, and they do not seek to offer full map editing tools for complete feature contributions. We incentivized citizens to create new map features that are currently not in the feature catalogue to reveal the novel data needs of citizens With this new concept, NLS seeks more refined ways of employing VGI to achieve better-quality map data with fewer resources while developing the relationship between the NMA and citizens.
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