ISPRS Hanover Workshop, Crowdsourced Mapping: Letting Amateurs into the Temple?

Transcription

1 ISPRS Hanover Workshop, 2013 Crowdsourced Mapping: Letting Amateurs into the Temple? Michael McCullagh Mike Jackson University of Nottingham 1

2 What is this talk about? 2 o This is a review! o What s Out There in the Wild? o What has VGI Mapping Achieved? o How is technology helping? o Whither Spatial Ontologies? o How closely have NSDIs associated themselves with VGIs? o A Future for NSDI and VGI?

3 What s in the Wild? What s Out There? Interconnectedness the LOD Cloud 3

4 What s in the Wild? o By Nov 2012 there were 7,920 APIs, of which 2,635 related to at least some element of mapping; this was an overall rise of 292 APIs over the previous month. o The pink shaded area shows growth in the 3 months up to August

5 Successful VGI Mapping? A Definition or Two... o Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is geographic data collected and made freely available by individuals. o Contributed geographic information (CGI) covers a broader range of data types but may also be geographic. It is not necessarily open source. o Crowdsourcing - Jeff Howe coined the phrase in a June 2006 Wired magazine article: Crowdsourcing is the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of a specialized few. 5

6 Successful VGI Mapping? Countries Using Google Maps, Michael McCullagh & Mike Jackson, Jeddah, 2012

7 Successful VGI Mapping? OSM no-name project 7 Melton Mowbray

8 Mass Involuntary Mapping? Twitter Language Map of London An Example of CGI 8 UCL, Aug 2012 Michael McCullagh & Mike Jackson, Jeddah, 2012

9 Useful Tapping Mapping? Twitter Language Map of London Matthew Somerville (Nov. 2012) 9 UCL, Aug 2012

10 Community VGI Mapping? 10 Politically Active SIG

11 Community VGI Mapping? Other-worldly crowdsourcing activity: Citizen scientists will be the first people to see much of Mars' southern pole. By January ,543 citizen scientists had already classified 547,858 images. You can help out right now by going to Planet Four. [from Escapist Magazine] Your world needs you! 11

12 Successful VGI in Action 12 Organised VGI at work - Patrick Meier s living room the Ushahidi- Haiti nerve centre at the start of the crisis (Jan 2010)

13 Successful VGI in Action From Barrington et al (2011). Building numbers in damage grades 4 (very heavy) and 5 (destroyed) identified by volunteers, by day, in earthquake. Less than two weeks after the event most of the damage had been mapped by the Ushahidi community. 13

14 Successful VGI in Action 14 From Perkins (2011), openstreetmap.org, OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. OSM before and after the Haiti earthquake part of Port-au-Prince

15 Successful VGI in Action Part of the OSM-Haiti earthquake damage map. 1.4M edits were performed during the first month 15

16 Successful VGI in Action Ushahidi sites in November 2012 some omitted at map borders, from 16

17 Successful VGI in Action Training in Action Christchurch earthquake survey. See The training image on the left indicates how damage appears on photos. 17 On the right yellow lines, drawn by the VGI community worldwide, outline serious earthquake damage to buildings.

18 How is Technology Helping? SVN Commits for OSGeo software between October 1998 and April Inset is a display of the number of authors supplying code to each project. From Shao et al (2012) 18

19 How is Technology Helping? OSM authorship for Bologna, using ITO! s OSM Mapper service. From Dodge et al (2012) Michael McCullagh & Mike Jackson, Jeddah, 2012

20 The Anarchy of the Crowd 20 The anarchy of the crowd can be seen as a threat: to Government jobs, to quality, to security, to political power, to balanced service provision. BUT...

21 How is Technology Helping? Salvation! 21

22 How is Technology Helping? Urban monitoring - connections between the physical and digital worlds. Resch et al (2012) 22

23 How is Technology Helping? Left, alert message example, sent by SMS (Boulos et al, 2011). Right, map of CO in Copenhagen, generated by bicycle couriers for the Open Scents project (Resch et al,

24 Time, Update and Volunteers OSM mapping, Perkins (2011) Robert Harting Discus Thrower

25 Indoor and Underground Increase in use of the building (blue) and the indoor key for OSM additions from 2007 up to From Goetz and Zipf (2011) 25

26 Indoor and Underground Route choices from (a) Bing,(b) Google Maps, (c) Mappy, (d) Via Michelin, (e) RouteNet and (f) OpenRouteService. From Vanclooster et al (2012) 26

27 Indoor and Underground Interior of Guildford Cathedral, showing the indoor online possibilities of Google s StreetView. Full walkabout very possible. 27

28 What, Spatial Ontologies? Shanahan (1995) suggests: If we are to develop a formal theory of common sense, we need a precisely defined language for talking about shape, spatial location and change. The understanding and semantics of geographical concepts vary VGI and PGI user communities need ontological formal languages and structures to represent the concepts used by any information community Stock (2008) argues that, as human semantics can be extremely informal in nature: Perhaps NSDIs have been too formal and do not account for this human flexibility? 28

29 Vague or Ill-defined? Feature Types Object Vagueness o Are these both rectangles? How can I tell? o Might one be part of a river? Or a road? o Or is it something else? 29 VGI communities have very different schema for classifying objects! Merging these can be a major effort.

30 Standards Equals Quality? Left, utility survey data at a junction, Right, same junction on finalised map From (Beck, 2008) 30

31 Accuracy, Quality, Trust MODIS (left) and GLC-2000 (right) images covering a 20km x 20km area around the UK town of Milton Keynes. Fritz et al (2011) 31

32 Accuracy, Quality, Trust Haklay et al (2010) Mooney (2012), the number of versions of edited ways (roads-ish) on the horizontal axis compared with the number of datasets falling into that category on the vertical axis, for Germany, Austria, and UK- Eire. Linus Law: A popular interpretation of the law states: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (Raymond, 2001, p.19). 32

33 Accuracy, Quality, Trust From Grira et al (2009), volunteer freedom of interaction compared with authoritarian constraint. 33

34 Accuracy, Quality, Trust 34 Cooper (2011) African based 2D VGI taxonomy, and the advent of the crowdsourced SDI.

35 Accuracy, Quality, Trust 35 Cadastral map showing correct house locations. From Stark (2010)

36 Accuracy, Quality, Trust 36 Attempts by Google Maps, Bing and Yahoo! Maps to locate addresses

37 Accuracy, Quality, Trust Distribution of distance errors in address location for the whole canton. Error in metres is shown along the horizontal axis; percentage in each distance category along vertical axis. From Stark (2010) 37

38 Accuracy, Quality, Trust Investigation of trust, a disaster response map for the University of Nottingham; Left, one with the University of Nottingham logo; Right one made purportedly by the unknown Sarah Smith. Which is more trustworthy? Idris et al (2011) 38

39 Accuracy, Quality, Trust 39 Traffic light indicators of quality, added to test viewer reaction to mashup authoritativeness. Idris et al (2011a)

40 VGI-NSDI: An Ever Closer Union? Entering the 3rd generation SDI The future awaits, lay users will control it. From Hennig et al (2011), and others. 40

41 A Future for NSDI & VGI? o Creating a top-down NSDI spans many years. o INSPIRE has taken 10+ years and implementation will take 8 more years. o However, the technology landscape is changing very much faster! 41

42 A Future for NSDI & VGI? How should Governments and Institutions respond to situations where the need for change is clear but the likely institutional timescales to achieve change exceeds the current cycle of innovation? 42

43 A Future for NSDI & VGI? The challenge is to conflate authoritative and crowd-sourced data. This requires: precise, structured, top-down directed, formal standards-based institutional approach but with cost, time and relevance penalties, and the more affordable, vibrant, relevant, rich and timely citizen-focussed approach of the crowd but with the short-comings of completeness, 43 precision, interoperability and anarchic direction.

44 A Future for NSDI & VGI? 44 What 70,000 volunteers can do...

45 Oops! Any Questions? 45